Seminar

Abstract

China is one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world, but in the meantime it is suffering from severe air pollution due to heavy industrial/metropolitan emissions. Most previous aerosol studies in China were based on filter sampling followed by laboratory analysis, which provided datasets at a coarse time resolution (~1 day). The coarse time resolution of the aerosol datasets cannot match the actual faster variation of aerosol properties in the real atmosphere, which strongly favors highly time-resolved on-line measurement techniques. In recent years, our group deployed an Aerodyne high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) and a DMT single particle soot photometer (SP2) in different ambient atmospheres in China, including Beijing (urban), Changdao (regional), Hongzehu (regional), Shanghai (urban), Jiaxing (urban), Shenzhen (urban), and Kaiping (regional). In this presentation, we use these on-line measurements to characterize the properties of submicron particles in China's atmosphere, such as chemical composition, size distribution, diurnal variation, elemental composition, organic aerosol constitution, as well as the mixing state of black carbon. Newly-developed AMS-PMF modeling techniques were utilized to quantitatively differentiate the contributions from fossil fuel combustion, cooking emissions, biomass burning, as well as secondary organic aerosols to ambient organic aerosol loadings in China. These results may provide a new outlook on the formation mechanisms of high aerosol pollution in China.