Beall, Charlotte M.; Lucero, Dolan; Hill, Thomas C.; DeMott, Paul J.; Stokes, M. Dale; Prather, Kimberly A. (2020). Data from: Best practices for precipitation sample storage for offline studies of ice nucleation. In Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment (CAICE). UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. https://doi.org/10.6075/J0M32T8B

Publication abstract: Ice nucleating particles (INPs) are efficiently removed from clouds through precipitation, a convenience of nature for the study of the rare particles (1 in 106 in the free troposphere) that influence multiple climate-relevant cloud properties including ice crystal concentrations, size distributions, and formation processes. INPs suspended in precipitation have been considered a basis for estimating in-cloud INP concentrations and for inferring their original composition. Offline droplet assays are commonly used to measure INP concentrations in precipitation samples. Heat and filtration “treatments” are used to probe INP composition and size ranges. Many previous studies report storing samples prior to INP analyses, but little is known about the effects of storage on INP concentration or their sensitivity to treatments. Here, through a study of 15 precipitation samples collected at a coastal location in La Jolla, CA, USA between 9/22/2016 and 11/22/2019, we bound enhancements and losses of INPs with warm to moderate freezing temperatures (-7 to -19 ºC) due to storage under 4 conditions: 1.) storage at room temperature (+ 21-23 ºC) , 2.) storage at +4 ºC 3.) storage at -20 ºC, and 4.) flash freezing samples with liquid nitrogen prior to storage at -20 ºC. Results demonstrate that storage can lead to both enhancements and losses of greater than one order of magnitude, non-heat-labile INPs are generally less sensitive to storage, and significant losses of INPs below 0.45 μm are exhibited across all tested storage protocols. No correlation between total storage time (1-166 days) and changes in INP concentration was found. We provide the following recommendations for precipitation samples from coastal environments intended for INP analysis: that samples be stored at -20 ºC to minimize storage artifacts, that potential changes due to storage are considered to be additional uncertainty in measurement of INP concentration (e.g. a loss of 25% on average, for samples stored at -20 ºC,), and that filtration treatments are applied only to fresh samples. Finally, correction factors are provided so that INP measurements obtained from stored samples may be used to estimate concentrations present in the fresh sample.

• Time period of data collection: 2016-09-22 to 2019-11-22

• 2020

• Beall, Charlotte M.

• Beall, Charlotte M.
• DeMott, Paul J.
• Hill, Thomas C.
• Lucero, Dolan
• Prather, Kimberly A.
• Stokes, M. Dale

• Prather, Kimberly A.

• La Jolla (San Diego, Calif.)

• Ice nucleation
• Precipitation
• Sample storage

• data
• text

• English

Primary associated publication

• Beall, Charlotte M.; Lucero, Dolan; Hill, Thomas C.; DeMott, Paul J.; Stokes, M. Dale; Prather, Kimberly A. (2020). Best practices for precipitation sample storage for offline studies of ice nucleation. Atmos. Meas. Tech., 13, 6473-6486. https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-6473-2020

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

• UC Regents

Under copyright (US)

Use: This work is available from the UC San Diego Library. This digital copy of the work is intended to support research, teaching, and private study.

Constraint(s) on Use: This work is protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). Use of this work beyond that allowed by "fair use" or any license applied to this work requires written permission of the copyright holder(s). Responsibility for obtaining permissions and any use and distribution of this work rests exclusively with the user and not the UC San Diego Library. Inquiries can be made to the UC San Diego Library program having custody of the work.

Research Data Curation Program, UC San Diego, La Jolla, 92093-0175 (https://lib.ucsd.edu/rdcp)

2022-07-19