AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
PMF*PMF: Towards a Better Link between PMF Outputs from ACSM Measurements and Aerosol Sources - First Application in the Region of Paris (France)
JEAN-EUDES PETIT, Jean Sciare, Olivier Favez, Roland Sarda-Esteve, Valérie Gros, Jose B. Nicolas, Philip Croteau, John Jayne, Grisa Mocnik, INERIS
Abstract Number: 92 Working Group: Source Apportionment
Abstract Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS) measurements combined with statistical tools (Positive Matrix Factorization, PMF), are nowadays more and more used worldwide to investigate sources of submicron aerosols and related atmospheric ageing processes. However, due to the inherent complexity of organic aerosol (OA) in the atmosphere, and keeping in mind current limitation in the PMF analysis, factors denomination and their scientific interpretation could be sometimes hazy or unsafe when attempting to make connections to pollution sources or atmospheric processes.
We present here a first investigation of the effectiveness of a double PMF analysis on an ACSM dataset obtained in Paris, during the 2012 late winter period. OA has been apportioned by a commonly used PMF analysis tool (Ulbrich et al., 2009). The resulted factors are then implemented in a second PMF calculation (EPA PMF v.3.0), adding inorganic ions measured by the ACSM (nitrate, sulfate, ammonium and chloride), and Black Carbon from fuel fossil and biomass burning, obtained using the Aethalometer model (Sandradewi et al., 2008). First results highlight a good agreement for some of the outputs (Biomass Burning Organic Aerosol almost 100% within the corresponding “wood burning” factor), but also evidences for a relation between Oxygenated Organic Aerosol and primary sources, and raising questions about a unique traffic origin of HOA. These results are consistent with those obtained from the characterization of two individual sources: traffic and biomass burning (via tunnel and chimney experiments), under conditions representative of the local ones.