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Abstract. Some biological particles, such as Snomax, are very active ice nucleating particles, inducing heterogeneous freezing in supercooled water at temperatures above −15 and up to −2 °C. Despite their exceptional freezing abilities, large uncertainties remain regarding the atmospheric abundance of biological ice nucleating particles, and their contribution to atmospheric ice nucleation. It has been suggested that small biological ice nucleating macromolecules or fragments can be carried on the surfaces of dust and other atmospheric particles. This could combine the atmospheric abundance of dust particles with the ice nucleating strength of biological material to create strongly enhanced and abundant ice nucleating surfaces in the atmosphere, with significant implications for the budget and distribution of atmospheric ice nucleating particles, and their consequent effects on cloud microphysics and mixed-phase clouds. The new critical surface area g framework that was developed by Beydoun et al. (2016) is extended to produce a heterogeneous ice nucleation mixing model that can predict the freezing behavior of multicomponent particle surfaces immersed in droplets. The model successfully predicts the immersion freezing properties of droplets containing Snomax bacterial particles across a mass concentration range of 7 orders of magnitude, by treating Snomax as comprised of two distinct distributions of heterogeneous ice nucleating activity. Furthermore, the model successfully predicts the immersion freezing behavior of a low-concentration mixture of Snomax and illite mineral particles, a proxy for the biological material–dust (bio-dust) mixtures observed in atmospheric aerosols. It is shown that even at very low Snomax concentrations in the mixture, droplet freezing at higher temperatures is still determined solely by the second less active and more abundant distribution of heterogeneous ice nucleating activity of Snomax, while freezing at lower temperatures is determined solely by the heterogeneous ice nucleating activity of pure illite. This demonstrates that in this proxy system, biological ice nucleating particles do not compromise their ice nucleating activity upon mixing with dust and no new range of intermediary freezing temperatures associated with the mixture of ice nucleating particles of differing activities is produced. The study is the first to directly examine the freezing behavior of a mixture of Snomax and illite and presents the first multicomponent ice nucleation model experimentally evaluated using a wide range of ice nucleating particle concentration mixtures in droplets.
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Significance of the surface silica/alumina ratio and surface termination on the immersion freezing of ZSM-5 zeolites
Heterogeneous ice nucleation in the atmosphere impacts climate, but the magnitude of the effect of ice clouds on radiative forcing is uncertain. Surfaces that promote ice nucleation are varied. Because O, Si, and Al are the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust, understanding how the Si : Al ratio impacts the ice nucleation activity of aluminosilicates through exploration of synthetic ZSM-5 samples provides a good model system. This paper investigates the immersion freezing of ZSM-5 samples with varying Si : Al ratios. Ice nucleation temperature increases with increasing surface Al content. Additionally, when ammonium, a common cation in aerosol particles, is adsorbed to the zeolite surface, initial freezing temperatures are reduced by up to 6 °C in comparison to proton-terminated zeolite surfaces. This large decrease in ice nucleation activity in the presence of ammonium suggests that the cation can interact with the surface to block or modify active sites. Our results on synthetic samples in which the surface composition is tunable gives insight into the role of surfaces in heterogeneous ice nucleation processes in the atmosphere. We emphasize the importance of examining surface chemical heterogeneities in ice nucleating particles that could result from a variety of aging pathways for a deeper understanding of the freezing mechanism.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1904803
- PAR ID:
- 10440817
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 16
- ISSN:
- 1463-9076
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 11442 to 11451
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1039/D2CP05466C
