AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
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Restaurant Impacts on Outdoor Air Quality: Elevated Organic Aerosol Mass from Restaurant Cooking with Neighborhood-scale Plume Extents
ELLIS SHIPLEY ROBINSON, Peishi Gu, Rishabh Shah, Zhongju Li, Qing Ye, Naomi Zimmerman, Joshua Apte, Allen Robinson, Albert Presto, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract Number: 678 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract Organic aerosol (OA) is the principal component of sub-micron particulate matter (PM) in urban locations, which is a regulated air pollutant in the United States due to its harmful effects on human health. We performed ambient sampling from a mobile platform with an aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) to better understand the spatial variability and sources of OA in the setting of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Previous studies have shown that OA from cooking activities contribute equally, if not more, to sub-micron PM in urban background locations compared to OA from vehicle exhaust. We sampled in some of the most populated areas in and around Pittsburgh, which included substantial sampling around major roads, areas with high restaurant density, and urban background locations. We found instances of greatly elevated concentrations (greater than 5 μg/m3 above the background concentration and up to ≈200 μg/m3 ) of OA around numerous restaurants and commercial areas containing multiple restaurants. The spatial extent of these elevated OA concentrations could be seen in some instances up to 200 m downwind of the restaurant(s), indicating that these sources can influence air quality on neighborhood scales. The spatial scale of elevated concentrations observed here is on the same order of the extent of pollutants downwind of highways that others have observed. We classified OA plumes using mass spectral similarity and the presence of mass spectral tracers into categories of cooking plumes, vehicle exhaust plumes, or plumes from some undetermined source. The majority of observed plumes were from cooking sources. Approximately 20 percent of the population of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, lives within 200 m of a restaurant. Allegheny County does not have regulations of cooking emissions from restaurants, which is typical of most urban areas in the United States, with some notable exceptions.