Vanadium (V) and nickel (Ni) are considered the most abundant trace metals in ship exhaust burning heavy fuel oils. This study is the first attempt to estimate the impact of V and Ni from shipping on air quality in East Asia for the year 2015. In this study, emission inventories of V and Ni from shipping and land‐based sources were constructed and implemented into the revised aerosol module to simulate ambient V and Ni concentrations. Our results showed that ship emissions contributed the majority of vanadium and were important to nickel emissions in most coastal regions in East Asia, with the contributions exceeding 60% and approximately 40% in some regions, respectively. The simulated ambient V and Ni concentrations has been validated by the measurements, and the comparison revealed there was an obvious improvement (reducing the mean bias by 32%–63%) in the model performance of the V and Ni predictions after including shipping emissions. Our study filled the gaps of trace element contributions in coastal regions and implied that the impact of metals from shipping traffic on regional air quality is worthy of attention in East Asia. Although the International Maritime Organization (IMO) low‐sulfur fuel policy has been implemented since 2020, the impact of shipping traffic on trace metals with respect to regional air quality is still important given heavy fuel oils being in use.

Atmospheric deposition brings both nutrients and toxic components to the surface ocean, resulting in important impacts on phytoplankton. Field and lab studies have been done on the iron (Fe) fertilization on marine phytoplankton. However, studies on other trace metals are limited. Both bioassay experiments and field observations have suggested that aerosols with high copper (Cu) concentrations can negatively affect the primary productivity and change phytoplankton community structure. Note that with increasing human activities and global environmental changes (e.g., ocean acidification, warming, deoxygenation, etc.), the input of aerosol Cu could exceed toxicity thresholds at certain times or in some sensitive oceanic regions. Here, we provide a comprehensive review on aerosol Cu and marine phytoplankton studies by summarizing (1) physiological effects and toxicity thresholds of Cu to various phytoplankton taxa, (2) interactions between Cu and other metals and major nutrients, and (3) global distribution of surface seawater Cu and atmospheric Cu. We suggest that studies on aerosols, seawater chemistry, and phytoplankton should be integrated for understanding the impacts of aerosol Cu on marine phytoplankton, and thereafter the air–sea interaction via biogeochemical processes.

Methanesulfonate (MSA) in the marine boundary layer is commonly considered to be solely contributed by the oxidation of ocean‐derived dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and often used as an indicator of marine biogenic sources. But whether this judgment is valid in coastal seas and how the validity is affected by air mass transport history have been less discussed. Based on multi‐year observations of aerosol MSA in the coastal East China Sea (ECS) and the Gulf of Aqaba (GA), as well as the analysis of air mass transport pattern and exposure to ocean surface phytoplankton biomass, we found that terrestrial sources made a non‐negligible contribution to MSA over the ECS but not over the GA. The abundant MSA in winter over the coastal ECS was likely associated with substantial emissions of volatile organic sulfur compounds from both anthropogenic and natural sources in eastern China and significant terrestrial transport influenced by the East Asian Monsoon. Good correlations between aerosol MSA and air mass exposure to surface phytoplankton biomass were established by removing the influence of terrestrial transport and confining the air transport height within boundary layer, which makes it possible to construct parameterizations for obtaining the spatiotemporal distributions of marine biogenic aerosol components using satellite ocean color datasets.