Impact of Changing Arctic Sea Ice Extent, Sea Ice Age, and Snow Depth on Sea Salt Aerosol From Blowing Snow and the Open Ocean for 1980–2017 Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

We evaluate the effects of rapidly changing Arctic sea ice conditions on sea salt aerosols (SSA) produced by oceanic wave-breaking and the sublimation of wind-lofted salty blowing snow on sea ice. We use the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model to assess the influence of changing extent of the open ocean, multi-year sea ice (MYI), first-year sea ice (FYI), and snow depths on SSA emissions for 1980–2017. We combine snow depths from the Lagrangian snow-evolution model (SnowModel-LG) together with an empirically-derived snow salinity function of snow depth to derive spatially and temporally varying snow surface salinity over Arctic FYI. We find that pan-Arctic SSA surface mass concentrations have increased by