Authors:

Jasmine Alayna Luckett

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About Paper:

The effect of Southeastern Pacific marine stratocumulus clouds globally impacts incoming solar radiation and helps cool the planet. They also provide water to local costal ecosystems and communities, who use fog for irrigation. These clouds are seasonal along the costal range from Peru to southern Chile. The fog and their dissolved nutrients settle into the dirt and deposit into the ecosystem. These clouds require humidity and an aerosol, or cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), to form. CCNs also affect cloud properties depending on which particle the cloud is formed on. The research question here is what the chemical makeup and source of the CCN is. Three hypotheses were proposed; there are multiple sources of CCN, cloud properties affect chemical concentrations, and CCN chemical composition differs as a function of altitude. To test this, we partnered with National University of San Agustin of Arequipa (UNSA), a local university in Arequipa, Peru, by designing and building four low-cost fog nets and installing them along the coastal range of the Pampas de La Joya desert region, increasing in altitude from 400-800 meters. We collected the water from the nets and analyzed ions using ion chromatography. The resulting data showed high concentrations of ions when cloud density was lower and vice versa. Natural sea salt was a major component of CCN, although the largest sea salt concentrations were found at middle altitudes, and not altitudes closer to the ocean. Keywords: Salts; Peru; Clouds; Fog Nets; Seawater

Source:

Purdue University / 2025

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Co-authors:

Jasmine Alayna Luckett