The impact of time-averaged volcanic sulphur emissions on the global cloud condensation nuclei budget in the pre-industrial era

Volcanoes are a strong source of sulphur dioxide (SO2) with time-averaged emission inventories (e.g. Andres and Kasgnoc, 1998) indicating that volcanoes account for around 40% of the total annual SO2 flux in the pre-industrial atmosphere. We use a global aerosol microphysics model (GLOMAP-mode) to quantify the contribution of time-averaged volcanic sulphur emissions (from both continuous passive degassing and explosive volcanoes) on the global cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) budget. GLOMAP-mode is capable of simulating microphysical processes, such as binary homogeneous nucleation, hygroscopic growth, coagulation, condensation, cloud processing (oxidation of dissolved SO2 to SO4 in cloud droplets), as well as dry and wet deposition. For this study we use a sulphur chemistry scheme which includes 7 species (DMS, DMSO, MSA, SO2, H2SO4, COS, CS2). The runs were conducted using four internally mixed aerosol components, sulphate (SO4), sea salt, black carbon (BC) and organic carbon (OC). We simulated the impact of volcanic degassing in a pre-industrial setting (i.e. using 1750 BC and OC emissions in the absence of any anthropogenic emissions) using the volcanic emission inventory by Dentener et al. (2006). This volcanic inventory is based on datasets by Andres and Kasgnoc (1998) and Halmer et al. (2002) and accounts for an annual flux of ∼13 Tg(S) of volcanic SO2.