Chemical and Physical Properties and Effects of the Manaus Urban Plume

Intensive Operating Periods (IOPs) of the Observations and Modeling of the Green Ocean Amazon (GoAmazon2014/5) took place in the wet and dry seasons of 2014. GoAmazon2014/5 was centered in the environs of Manaus, a city of two million people. Manaus is an isolated urban area in the central Amazon Basin situated at the confluence of the two major tributaries of the Amazon river. Outside this industrial city there is natural forest for over 1000 to 2000 km in every direction. As part of GoAmazon2014/5, there were six ground stations in and around Manaus as well as coordinated flights of the HALO aircraft with a Gulfstream–1 (G1). The GoAmazon2014/5 campaign sought to quantify and understand how aerosol and cloud life cycles in a particularly clean background in the tropics are influenced by pollutant outflow from a large tropical city. Herein, selected results are presented of the chemical and physical properties and effects of the Manaus urban plume. The susceptibility of cloud-aerosol-precipitation interactions as well as regional air quality to present-day and future pollution in the tropics is the focus.