资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

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.