The impacts of Dust and Sand Storms (DSS) on people, crops, livestock, infrastructure and health are well documented. Data have accumulated on the deleterious effects of dust aerosols when they settle on plants. Sand blasting of low growing plants is a common cause of failure in reforestation efforts. Burial of plants by moving sands are also a cause of much damage. The physics of moving sand a...

Introduction: Geologic evidence indicates that the K/T mass extinction occurred on 65 million years ago is caused by an asteroid or comet impact [e. g., 1]. However, the actual mechanism that caused the mass extinction is still very controversial. The impact generated sulfuric oxides are thought to cause an environmental perturbation and it is one of the most plausible hypotheses of the K/T kil...

The atmospheric effects of soot aerosols include interference with radiative transfer, visibility impairment, and alteration of cloud formation and are highly sensitive to the manner by which soot is internally mixed with other aerosol constituents. We present experimental studies to show that soot particles acquire a large mass fraction of sulfuric acid during atmospheric aging, considerably a...

Fine aerosol particles collected in Southeast Asia during 1997 Indonesian forest fires were studied for the concentrations of total carbon (TC), water-soluble organic carbon (WSOC) and low molecular weight dicarboxylic acids (C2-C12) as well as carbon isotopic ratios of TC (δCTC). TC and WSOC showed a large increase during the heavy forest fire event. At the same period, dicarboxylic acids, dom...

The source, characteristics and transport of viable microbial aerosols in urban centers are topics of significant environmental and public health concern. Recent studies have identified adjacent waterways, and especially polluted waterways, as an important source of microbial aerosols to urban air. The size of these aerosols influences how far they travel, their resistance to environmental stre...

Aerosols are of central importance for atmospheric chemistry and physics, the biosphere, climate, and public health. The airborne solid and liquid particles in the nanometer to micrometer size range influence the energy balance of the Earth, the hydrological cycle, atmospheric circulation, and the abundance of greenhouse and reactive trace gases. Moreover, they play important roles in the repro...

A modified large-volume sampler was demonstrated to be an efficient device for the collection of mono-disperse aerosols of rhodamine B and poly-disperse aerosols of bacterial cells. Absolute efficiency for collection of rhodamine B varied from 100% with 5-mum particles to about 70% with 0.5-mum particles. The sampler concentrated the particles from 950 liters of air into a flow of between 1 and...

Atmospheric aerosols affect the radiation balance at the surface and at the top of the earth’s atmosphere. They directly scatter and absorb radiation, yet the aerosol particles indirectly affect the radiation budget because they act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). This changes the optical properties of the cloud. For example, an increase in aerosols increases the number of CCN. This may lea...

In oligotrophic regions, such as the Mediterranean Sea, atmospheric deposition has the potential to stimulate heterotrophic prokaryote growth and production in surface waters, especially during the summer stratification period. Previous studies focused on the role of leaching nutrients from mineral particles of Saharan (S) origin, and were restricted to single locations at given times of the ye...