Modeling of Carbonyl/Ammonium Sulfate Aqueous Brown Carbon Chemistry via UV/Vis Spectral Decomposition

Abstract

The proper characterization of aqueous brown carbon (BrC) species, their formation, and their light absorbance properties is critical to understanding the aggregate effect that they have on overall atmospheric aerosol climate forcing. The contribution of dark chemistry secondary organic aerosol (SOA) products from carbonyl-containing organic compounds (CVOCs) to overall aqueous aerosol optical properties is expected to be significant. However, the multiple, parallel pathways that take place within CVOC reaction systems and the differing chromophoricity of individual products complicates the ability to reliably model the chemical kinetics taking place. Here, we proposed an alternative method of representing UV-visible absorbance spectra as a composite of Gaussian lineshape functions to infer kinetic information. Multiple numbers of curves and different CVOC/ammonium reaction systems were compared. A model using three fitted Gaussian curves with magnitudes following first-order kinetics achieved an accuracy within 65.5% in the 205–300-nm range across multiple organic types and solution aging times. Asymmetrical peaks that occurred in low-200-nm wavelengths were decomposed into two overlapping Gaussian curves, which may have been attributable to different functional groups or families of reaction products. Component curves within overall spectra exhibited different dynamics, implying that the utilization of absorbance at a single reference wavelength to infer reaction rate constants may result in misrepresentative kinetics for these systems.