Abstract
The results of air quality monitoring show significantly increased concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and arsenic in the area located near the town of Kladno in Central Bohemia, Czech Republic. The region of interest is historically associated with coal mines and steelworks. Source apportionment using the method of Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) at three sites has been used to try to explain the reasons of the increased PM2.5, benzo[a]pyrene, and arsenic concentrations in the ambient air. Based on the PMF analysis, nine factors explaining the atmospheric aerosol mass have been identified. The PMF results showed that most of the aerosol mass originated from residential heating (about one third of PM2.5), both primary particles and secondary organic aerosols induced by road traffic (up to approximately 25%), soil and other mineral dust (about 15%), secondary inorganic aerosol ammonium sulfate (up to 16%), ammonium nitrate (up to 14%) and other sulfates (up to 9%). The main source of arsenic and benzo[a]pyrene was residential heating, which accounted for two-thirds and 80% of their total mass, respectively. The results have pointed to the most important measures for effective air quality protection in the area of interest: replacing coal fuel and old boilers used for residential heating in order to reduce arsenic and PAH emissions and mitigate sources of secondary particles precursors to decrease PM concentrations.
Highlights
Institute show significantly increased concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and arsenic in the central part of the Czech Republic near the city of Kladno.The affected region is located within the connecting lines between the cities of Kladno, Louny, Rakovník, Žatec, and Beroun, with a total area of approximately 850 km2 (Figure 1a).The area of interest is characterized by the occurrence of localities with high concentrations of benzo[a]pyrene and arsenic
Samples collected at different sites have already been used in many other Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) source apportionment studies, and the approach has proven to increase the statistical significance of the analysis, it assumes that chemical profiles of sources do not vary at the different sites [14]
This number of samples is sufficient for reliable source apportionment based on the PMF model, as it is in accordance with its official user guide [15] (PMF is often used on speciated PM2.5 datasets with a size above 100 samples.)
Summary
The area of interest is characterized by the occurrence of localities with high concentrations of benzo[a]pyrene and arsenic. According to [2,3,4,5], the average annual concentrations of benzo[a]pyrene in some localities in the area are up to more than twice their annual limit value [6]. The average annual concentrations of As in the area of interest do not exceed the annual limit, high daily values of As are measured in the winter, and the average concentrations of winter months are significantly higher than the value of the annual limit [2,3,4,5]. The measured daily concentrations of benzo[a]pyrene and arsenic in some localities of the area of interest reach
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