Abstract
The core diameter and shell thickness of black carbon (BC)-containing ambient aerosols directly determine their corresponding optical properties and aging processing, influencing significantly on the environment and climate change. The information of ambient particle core-shell structure is usually obtained using the single particle soot photometer (SP2) measurements. In this study, we found that the particle sizes measured by SP2 were limited within the core diameter larger than 84 nm and particle scattering diameter larger than 178 nm. There were about 34.9% of the ambient BC-containing aerosols that are mistaken for pure BC aerosols without coating. The lower limits of SP2 measurement lead to overestimation of the pure BC aerosol number concentrations and missing information of the shell thickness of BC-containing aerosol. Thus the statistical shell thickness of ambient BC-containing particles was underestimated and the aging process of ambient BC-containing aerosols derived from the SP2 measurements is misleading.
Published Version
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