Abstract
Observations of particulate matter less than 10 µm (PM10) were conducted from January to December in 2015 in the Ciuc basin, Eastern Carpathians, Romania. Daily concentrations of PM10 ranged from 10.90 to 167.70 µg/m3, with an annual mean concentration of 46.31 µg/m3, which is higher than the European Union limit of 40 µg/m3. Samples were analyzed for a total of 21 elements. O, C and Si were the most abundant elements accounting for about 85% of the PM10 mass. Source identification showed that the elemental composition of PM10 is represented by post volcanic activity, crustal origin, and anthropogenic sources, caused by the resuspension of crustal material, sea salt and soil dust. The average PM10 composition was 72.10% soil, 20.92% smoke K, 13.84% salt, 1.53% sulfate and 1.02% organic matter. The back-trajectory analysis showed that the majority of PM10 pollution comes from the West, Southwest and South.
Highlights
Air pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century due to the highly mobile characteristics of atmospheric pollutants
The higher P M10 concentrations are correlated with fossil fuel and biomass burning emissions, and enhanced by the meteorological conditions, such as thermal inversions, which favors the accumulation of PM10 and other pollutants (Szép and Mátyás 2014; He et al 2017)
PM10 concentrations were studied during the year of 2015 in the Ciuc basin, Eastern Carpathians in order to determine the elemental composition and the sources of atmospheric particulate matter
Summary
Air pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century due to the highly mobile characteristics of atmospheric pollutants. The inhalable fractions, which are coarse particles with a diameter ≤ 10 μm are known as PM10 (Naimabadi et al 2016; Di Vaio et al 2016). Due to its various origins and to the ever changing air quality, PM can have diverse chemical and biological characteristics (Pope and Dockery 2006; Naimabadi et al 2016), it is very important to study the chemical and elemental composition of atmospheric particulate matter. Mg can be attributed to marine sources too, along with Cl and Na, being present in great concentrations in sea spray (Szép et al 2018), while Fe, along with Zn can originate from anthropogenic sources too, such as the manufacturing of fuel tanks (Zalakeviciute et al 2020). Ba may be present in PM fractions from coke production (Konieczyński et al 2012), while the presence of O and C suggests post volcanic activity
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