dan-cziczo-maria-zawadowicz-measuring-biological-dust-in-upper-atmosphere-0620

When applied to previously-collected atmospheric samples and data, their findings support evidence that on average these bioaerosols globally make up less than 1 percent of the particles in the upper troposphere -- where they could influence cloud formation and by extension, the climate -- and not around 25 to 50 percent as some previous research suggests. While atmospheric and climate modeling suggests that bioaerosols, globally averaged, are not abundant and efficient enough at freezing to significantly influence cloud formation, research findings have varied significantly. The group leveraged the presence of phosphorus in the mass spectra to train the classification machine learning algorithm on known samples and then, primed, applied it to field data acquired from Desert Research Institute's Storm Peak Laboratory in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and from the Carbonaceous Aerosol and Radiative Effects Study based in the town of Cool, California. Knowing that the principal atmospheric emissions of phosphorus are from mineral dust, combustion products, and biological particles, they exploited the presence of phosphate and organic nitrogen ions and their characteristic ratios in known samples to classify the particles.