Atmospheric aerosol in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and its surroundings has received widely scientific concern in recent decades owing to its significant impacts on regional climatic and cryospheric changes, ecological and environmental securities, and hydrological cycle. However, our understanding on the atmospheric aerosol in this remote region is highly limited by the scarcely available dataset, which has been proved to be an important factor on disturbing the climate and environment in this region. The extremely harsh natural conditions hamper the exploration of the observation. This condition has been improved in recent decade by constructing a few stable field observatories at typical sites on the TP and its surroundings. A comprehensive project was carried out since 2015 to investigate the properties and sources of atmospheric aerosols as well as their regional differences in the vast TP regions by performing multiple short-term intensive field observations using a suite of high-resolution online instruments. This paper presents a systematic dataset of the high-time-resolution (hourly scales) aerosol physicochemical and optical properties at seven different sites over the TP and its surroundings from the observation project, including the size-resolved chemical compositions of submicron aerosols, standard high-resolution mass spectra and sources of organic aerosols, size distributions of particle number concentrations, particle light scattering and absorption coefficients, particle light absorptions from different carbonaceous substances of black carbon and brown carbon, number concentrations of cloud condensation nuclei, and concentrations of gaseous pollutants. In brief, atmospheric aerosols in these remote sites were all well-mixed and highly-aged due to their regional transport sources. However, high contributions of carbonaceous organic aerosols, overall neutralized submicron aerosols, and relatively higher light absorption capability were observed in the southern TP, whereas secondary inorganic species contributed dominantly to the overall acidic submicron aerosols in the northern TP. In addition to the insights into the regional differences of aerosol sources and properties in the vast TP regions, the datasets are also useful for the simulation of aerosol radiative forcing and the evaluation of interactions among different components of the Earth system in numerical models.

Tibetan Plateau; Aerosol Mass Spectromatry