Source apportionment of the carbonaceous aerosol – Quantitative estimates based on 14C- and organic tracer analysis.
Abstract
Until recently there has been no way of separating such particles from particles from other sources in the ambient air. By the combined effort of thermal optical, 14C-, and organic tracer analysis this is now possible. When treating such data statistically using Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), we are able to apportion the ambient aerosol carbonaceous material to a total of seven different sources, i.e. Elemental carbon from combustion of biomass (ECbb) and fossil fuel (ECff), organic carbon from combustion of biomass (OCbb) and fossil fuel (OCff), primary biogenics (OCpb), and secondary organic aerosols from anthropogenic and (ASOA) and biogenic (BSOA) precursors. The current approach makes it possible to separate not only primary versus secondary aerosols, but also to separate between natural and anthropogenic sources, which is highly important in order to sort out abatement strategies for reducing man-made emissions of combustion derived primary particles.