Despite strong impacts that aerosols have on climate and air quality, significant gaps remain in our knowledge concerning their long‐range transport, especially extreme transport events. With this consideration in mind and by leveraging the “atmospheric river” concept, this work develops an objective global algorithm for detecting aerosol atmospheric rivers (AARs), shows a climatology of AARs, elucidates their contributions to major global aerosol transport pathways, and illustrates how AARs can drive extreme cases of poor air quality conditions. Our methodology separately accounts for dust, carbonaceous (accounting for organic and black carbon separately where appropriate), sea salt, and sulfate aerosols. Findings show there are a number of long‐range regional transport pathways where AARs account for a sizable fraction (40% to >100%) of the total transport in relatively few events (20–40 AAR days/year). This study highlights the role of AARs in establishing source‐receptor relationships that can drive regional air‐quality and extremes.

中文翻译：

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将大气河的概念扩展到气溶胶：气候和空气质量的影响

尽管气雾剂对气候和空气质量产生了巨大影响，但我们对气溶胶的远距离运输（尤其是极端运输事件）的认识仍然存在很大差距。考虑到这一点并利用“大气河”概念，这项工作开发了一种用于检测气溶胶大气河（AAR）的客观全球算法，展示了AAR的气候，阐明了它们对主要全球气溶胶输送路径的贡献，并说明了如何AAR可能导致空气质量状况恶劣的极端情况。我们的方法分别考虑了粉尘，碳质（适当时分别说明了有机碳和黑碳），海盐和硫酸盐气溶胶。研究结果表明，有许多远程区域运输途径，其中AAR占相当大的比例（40％到> 相对较少的事件（每年20-40 AAR天）中的总运输量的100％）。这项研究强调了AAR在建立可驱动区域空气质量和极端状况的源－受体关系中的作用。