Abstract
In recent years, the Indian capital city of Delhi has been impacted by very high levels of air pollution, especially during winters. Comprehensive knowledge of the composition and sources of the organic aerosol (OA), which constitutes a substantial fraction of total particulate mass (PM) in Delhi, is central to formulating effective public health policies. Previous source apportionment studies in Delhi identified key sources of primary OA (POA) and showed that secondary OA (SOA) played a major role, but were unable to resolve specific SOA sources. We address the latter through the first field deployment of an extractive electrospray ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (EESI-TOF) in Delhi, together with a high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS). Measurements were conducted during the winter of 2018/2019, and positive matrix factorization (PMF) was used separately on AMS and EESI-TOF datasets to apportion the sources of OA. AMS PMF analysis yielded three primary and two secondary factors which were attributed to hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA), biomass burning OA (BBOA-1 and 2), more oxidized oxygenated OA (MO-OOA), and less oxidized oxygenated OA (LO-OOA). On average, 40 % of the total OA mass was apportioned to the secondary factors. The SOA contribution to total OA mass varied greatly between daytime (76.8 %, 10:00–16:00 local time (LT)) and nighttime (31.0 %, 21:00–04:00 local time). The higher chemical resolution of EESI-TOF data allowed identification of individual SOA sources. The EESI-TOF PMF analysis in total yielded six factors, two of which were primary factors (primary biomass burning and cooking-related OA). The remaining four factors were predominantly of secondary origin: aromatic SOA, biogenic SOA, aged biomass burning SOA, and mixed urban SOA. Due to the uncertainties in the EESI-TOF ion sensitivities, mass concentrations of EESI-TOF SOA dominated factors were related to the total AMS SOA (i.e., MO-OOA + LO-OOA) by multi-linear regression (MLR). Aromatic SOA was the major SOA component during the day-time, with 55.2 % contribution to total SOA mass (42.4 % contribution to total OA). Its contribution to total SOA, however, decreased to 25.4 % (7.9 % of total OA) during night-time. This factor was attributed to the oxidation of light aromatic compounds emitted mostly from traffic. Biogenic SOA accounted for 18.4 % of total SOA mass (14.2 % of total OA) during day-time and 36.1 % of total SOA mass (11.2 % of total OA) during night-time. Aged biomass burning and mixed urban SOA accounted for 15.2 % and 11.0 % of total SOA mass ( 11.7 % and 8.5 % of total OA mass) during day-time respectively and 15.4 % and 22.9 % of total SOA mass (4.8 % and 7.1 % of total OA mass) during night-time, respectively. A simple dilution/partitioning model was applied on all EESI-TOF factors to estimate the fraction of observed day-time concentrations resulting from local photochemical production (SOA) or emissions (POA). Aromatic SOA, aged biomass burning, and mixed urban SOA were all found to be dominated by local photochemical production, likely from the oxidation of locally emitted VOCs. In contrast, biogenic SOA was related to the oxidation of diffuse regional emissions of isoprene and monoterpenes. The findings of this study show that in Delhi, the night-time high concentrations are caused by POA emissions led by traffic and biomass burning, and the daytime OA is dominated by SOA, with aromatic SOA accounting for the largest fraction. Because aromatic SOA is possibly more toxic than biogenic SOA and primary OA, its dominance during the day-time suggests an increased OA toxicity and health-related consequences for the general public.
Highlights
Atmospheric aerosols are suspensions of tiny solid or liquid particles in the air, ranging from a few nanometres to tens of micrometres in size
From the two retrieved secondary OA (SOA) factors, more oxidized oxygenated organic aerosols (OA) (MO-oxygenated organic aerosol (OOA)) is more oxygenated with a bulk O:C ratio of 0.99, which is highest among all the factors (> 2 times higher than that of less oxidized oxygenated OA (LO-OOA) and biomass burning organic aerosol (BBOA) and ~12 times higher than hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA))
Despite the aforementioned boundary layer effects, the diurnal trend of MO-OOA shows an increase during the day, implying formation occurs as a result of day10 time photochemical reactions, the sources/precursors cannot be inferred from the aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) factor spectrum
Summary
Atmospheric aerosols are suspensions of tiny solid or liquid particles in the air, ranging from a few nanometres (nm) to tens of micrometres (μm) in size. Despite SOA being an important fraction of total OA and its toxicity (Daellenbach et al, 2020), our understanding of sources and formation processes of SOA in the atmosphere remains incomplete (Hallquist et al, 2009; Shrivastava et al, 2017) This limits our ability to accurately constrain SOA contributions in global climate models and regional air quality models and impedes efforts to understand SOA health effects. Several recent studies have investigated the composition and sources of non-refractory (NR) OA in Delhi using highly time-resolved online measurements by an aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) or an aerosol chemical speciation monitor (ACSM) (Bhandari et al, 2020; Gani et al, 2019; Lalchandani et al, 2021; Tobler et al, 2020) These 30 studies were able to quantitatively resolve the most dominant POA sources i.e., traffic-related, hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol (HOA) and biomass burning organic aerosol (BBOA) (Bhandari et al, 2020; Lalchandani et al, 2021; Tobler et al, 2020). While AMS/ACSM datasets provide quantitative estimates of individual POA factors and total SOA contribution, they are able to describe SOA only in terms of bulk descriptors such as level of oxygenation (i.e., bulk O/C ratio)
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