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Abstract
Abstract. Organic aerosols (OA) represent one of the major constituents of submicron particulate matter (PM1) and comprise a huge variety of compounds emitted by different sources. Three intensive measurement field campaigns to investigate the aerosol chemical composition all over Europe were carried out within the framework of the European Integrated Project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interactions (EUCAARI) and the intensive campaigns of European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) during 2008 (May–June and September–October) and 2009 (February–March). In this paper we focus on the identification of the main organic aerosol sources and we define a standardized methodology to perform source apportionment using positive matrix factorization (PMF) with the multilinear engine (ME-2) on Aerodyne aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) data. Our source apportionment procedure is tested and applied on 25 data sets accounting for two urban, several rural and remote and two high altitude sites; therefore it is likely suitable for the treatment of AMS-related ambient data sets. For most of the sites, four organic components are retrieved, improving significantly previous source apportionment results where only a separation in primary and secondary OA sources was possible. Generally, our solutions include two primary OA sources, i.e. hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA) and biomass burning OA (BBOA) and two secondary OA components, i.e. semi-volatile oxygenated OA (SV-OOA) and low-volatility oxygenated OA (LV-OOA). For specific sites cooking-related (COA) and marine-related sources (MSA) are also separated. Finally, our work provides a large overview of organic aerosol sources in Europe and an interesting set of highly time resolved data for modeling purposes.
Highlights
Atmospheric aerosols negatively affect human health (Pope and Dockery, 2006), reduce visibility, and interact with climate and ecosystems (IPCC, 2007)
In this paper we focus on the identification of the main organic aerosol sources and we define a standardized methodology to perform source apportionment using positive matrix factorization (PMF) with the multilinear engine (ME-2) on Aerodyne aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) data
In this paper we focus on the organic aerosols (OA) component which represents the major fraction of submicron particulate matter for most of the sites, ranging between 20 and 63 % of PM1, consistent with the values found by Jimenez et al (2009) and Ng et al (2010)
Summary
Atmospheric aerosols negatively affect human health (Pope and Dockery, 2006), reduce visibility, and interact with climate and ecosystems (IPCC, 2007). Ng et al (2010) provided an overview of OA sources in the Northern Hemisphere, including a broader spatial domain than Europe and a wide range of locations affected by different aerosol sources Their major focus was the investigation of the secondary oxygenated components and their aging. Lanz et al (2010) provided an overview of the aerosol chemical composition and OA sources in central Europe focusing on Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, and Liechtenstein In all of these studies, the major fraction of PM1 was often represented by organics which consisted, for most of the locations, of oxygenated OA; the contribution of primary sources (like traffic and biomass burning) was not always identified especially in rural and remote places. Our results will help in evaluating the accuracy of emission inventories (especially concerning primary sources) which need better constraints to improve regional and global models (Kanakidou et al, 2005; De Gouw and Jimenez, 2009), while SOA sources obtained from AMS source apportionment could be used to constrain SOA in global chemical transport models (Spracklen et al, 2011)
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