Towards a better understanding of fine PM sources: Online and offline datasets combination in a single PMF

Source apportionment (SA) techniques allocate the measured ambient pollutants with their potential source origin; thus, they are a powerful tool for designing air pollution mitigation strategies. Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) is one of the most widely used SA approaches, and its multi-time resolution (MTR) methodology, which enables mixing different instrument data in their original time resolution, was the focus of this study. One year of co-located measurements in Barcelona, Spain, of non-refractory submicronic particulate matter (NR-PM1), black carbon (BC) and metals were obtained by a Q-ACSM (Aerodyne Research Inc.), an aethalometer (Aerosol d.o.o.) and fine offline quartz-fibre filters, respectively. These data were combined in a MTR PMF analysis preserving the high time resolution (30 min for the NR-PM1 and BC, and 24 h every 4th day for the offline samples). The MTR-PMF outcomes were assessed varying the time resolution of the high-resolution data subset and exploring the error weightings of both subsets. The time resolution assessment revealed that averaging the high-resolution data was disadvantageous in terms of model residuals and environmental interpretability. The MTR-PMF resolved eight PM1 sources: ammonium sulphate + heavy oil combustion (25%), ammonium nitrate + ammonium chloride (17%), aged secondary organic aerosol (SOA) (16%), traffic (14%), biomass burning (9%), fresh SOA (8%), cooking-like organic aerosol (5%), and industry (4%). The MTR-PMF technique identified two more sources relative to the 24 h base case data subset using the same species and four more with respect to the pseudo-conventional approach mimicking offline PMF, indicating that the combination of both high and low TR data is significantly beneficial for SA. Besides the higher number of sources, the MTR-PMF technique has enabled some sources disentanglement compared to the pseudo-conventional and base case PMF as well as the characterisation of their intra-day patterns.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Via, Marta, Yus-Díez, Jesús, Canonaco, Francesco, Petit, Jean-Eudes, Hopke, Philip, Reche, Cristina, Pandolfi, Marco, Ivančič, Matic, Rigler, Martin, Prevôt, André S. H., Querol, Xavier, Alastuey, Andrés, Minguillón, María Cruz
Other Authors: 0000-0002-5766-3484
Format: artículo biblioteca
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2023-07
Subjects:Submicronic particulate matter, ME2, Metals, Multi-time resolution, Multilinear engine, Organic sources, PMF, Positive matrix factorisation, SoFi, Source apportionment, http://metadata.un.org/sdg/13, Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts,
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/312381
https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85161303254
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