High-resolution physicochemical dataset of atmospheric aerosols over the Tibetan Plateau and its surroundings

Abstract

Abstract. Atmospheric aerosol in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and its surroundings has received widely scientific concern in recent decades owing to its significant impacts on regional climatic and cryospheric changes, ecological and environmental securities, and hydrological cycle. However, our understanding on the atmospheric aerosol in this remote region is highly limited by the scarcely available dataset. A comprehensive project was carried out since 2015 to investigate the properties and sources of atmospheric aerosols as well as their regional differences in the vast TP regions by performing multiple short-term intensive field observations using a suite of high-resolution online instruments. This paper presents a systematic dataset of the high-time-resolution (hourly scales) aerosol physicochemical and optical properties at seven different sites over the TP and its surroundings from the observation project, including the size-resolved chemical compositions of submicron aerosols, the standard high-resolution mass spectra and sources of organic aerosols, size distributions of particle number concentrations, particle light absorption and scattering coefficients, particle light absorptions from black carbon and brown carbon, number concentrations of cloud condensation nuclei, and concentrations of gaseous pollutants. The datset get the insights into the regional differences of aerosol sources and properties in the vast TP regions and are also useful for the simulation of aerosol radiative forcing and the evaluation of interactions among different components of the Earth system in numerical models. The released datasets are presented in the form of Excel file and available to download from the National Cryosphere Desert Data Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (https://doi.org/10.12072/ncdc.NIEER.db2200.2022; Xu, 2022).