Global Ocean data set of marine aerosol properties

Abstract

Abstract. NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) has made measurements of aerosol chemical, microphysical, optical, and cloud nucleating properties onboard research cruises since 1991. The twenty-five cruises have covered all of the world's oceans – the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern. The result is the most comprehensive, publicly available database of aerosol properties in the marine atmosphere to date. The database also contains gas-phase species (O3, SO2), Radon, and dimethylsulfide (DMS), seawater species (DMS, NH4+, NO3-, and chlorophyll a), and meteorological parameters. Details of the cruises (locations, dates, and objectives), parameters measured, instrumentation used, and data availability are provided here. Also included are PMEL's high-level major findings and past usage of the data by others. The goal of this paper is to promote broader awareness of the database to the atmospheric aerosol in situ measurement, satellite, and modelling communities. Data are publicly available at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) data archive (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/, NOAA, 2025) (see also the list of all data sets in Table 7). Links to the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for each cruise are provided herein.