AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Is Alaska Truly the Great Escape from Air Pollution? – Long Term Source Apportionment of Fine Particulate Matter in Fairbanks, AK
YUNGANG WANG, Philip K. Hopke, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Abstract Number: 111 Working Group: Source Apportionment
Abstract Most people think of Alaska as one of the last great escapes from air pollution. However, they have not spent a winter in Fairbanks or the nearby town of North Pole, where the daily average PM$_2.5 concentration was 170 micro-g/m$^3 in December 2012. Prior source apportionment modeling was performed using PM$_2.5 speciation data collected at Fairbanks, Alaska during 2008 to 2011 (Ward et al., 2012). Wood combustion was found to be the largest contributor to PM2.5 throughout the winter months. Huy and Mölders, (2012) investigated effects of exchanging noncertified with certified wood-burning devices on the PM$_2.5 concentrations in Fairbanks, Alaska during the cold season. Changing out 2930 uncertified woodstoves and 90 outdoor wood boilers reduced the daily average PM$_2.5 concentrations by 0.6 micro-g/m$^3. In this study, source apportionment using Positive Factorization Matrix (PMF 5.0) has been conducted based on the 2005-2012 PM$_2.5 compositional data including elements, sulfate, nitrate, ammonia, elemental carbon (EC), and organic carbon (OC) from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency speciation network. The PM$_2.5, EC, and OC concentrations apportioned to wood combustion has been quantified. The temporal variation of wood combustion contributions has been studied as well. In the future, additional source apportionment using other receptor models and tracers will need to be conducted to confirm the results. For example, aethalometer delta-C, a simple, cheap, readily accessible, and of high time resolution marker of wood smoke, could help further apportion the wood stove contributions to PM$_2.5 (Wang et al., 2011).
References
Huy N. Q. Tran and Nicole Mölders, 2012. Advances in Meteorology, doi:10.1155/2012/853405.
Wang, Y., Hopke, P. K., Rattigan, O. V., Xia, X., 2011. Environmental Science & Technology, 45(17): 7387-7393.
Ward, T., Trost, B., Conner, J., Flanagan, J., Jayanty, R.K.M., 2012. Aerosol and Air Quality Research, 12: 536-543.