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Abstract. Gas–particle partitioning of water-soluble organic compounds plays a significant role in influencing the formation, transport, and lifetime oforganic aerosols in the atmosphere, but is poorly characterized. In this work, gas- and particle-phase concentrations of isoprene oxidation products(C5-alkene triols and 2-methylterols), levoglucosan, and sugar polyols were measured simultaneously at a suburban site of the western Yangtze RiverDelta in east China. All target polyols were primarily distributed into the particle phase (85.9 %–99.8 %). Given the uncertainties inmeasurements and vapor pressure predictions, a dependence of particle-phase fractions on vapor pressures cannot be determined. To explore the impactof aerosol liquid water on gas–particle partitioning of polyol tracers, three partitioning schemes (Cases 1–3) were proposed based onequilibriums of gas vs. organic and aqueous phases in aerosols. If particulate organic matter (OM) is presumed as the only absorbing phase(Case 1), the measurement-based absorptive partitioning coefficients (Kp,OMm) of isoprene oxidation products and levoglucosan were more than 10 times greater than predicted values (Kp,OMt). The agreement betweenKp,OMm and Kp,OMt was substantially improved when solubility in a separate aqueous phase wasincluded, whenever water-soluble and water-insoluble OM partitioned into separate (Case 2) or single (Case 3) liquid phases,suggesting that the partitioning of polyol tracers into the aqueous phase in aerosols should not be ignored. The measurement-based effective Henry'slaw coefficients (KH,em) of polyol tracers were orders of magnitude higher than their predicted values in pure water(KH,wt). Due to the moderate correlations between log⁡(KH,em/KH,wt) andmolality of sulfate ions, the gap between KH,em and KH,wt of polyol tracers could not be fullyparameterized by the equation defining “salting-in” effects and might be ascribed to mechanisms of reactive uptake, aqueous phase reaction,“like-dissolves-like” principle, etc. These study results also partly reveal the discrepancy between observation and modeling of organicaerosols.