American Association for Aerosol Research - Abstract Submission

AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

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Temporally-Refined Sources of Light-Absorbing Species in Arctic Snow

KATRINA M. MACDONALD, Lin Huang, Andrew Platt, Sangeeta Sharma, Desiree Toom-Sauntry, Jonathan Abbatt, Greg J. Evans, University of Toronto

Abstract Number: 185
Working Group: Source Apportionment

Abstract
The deposition of pollutants in Arctic snow strongly contributes to albedo decrease and subsequent melting. As such, understanding the sources of these pollutants is a critical step in the development of control and mitigation strategies to protect the Arctic environment. Light-absorbing species such as black carbon, brown carbon and soil particles are of particular concern due to their impact on snow and ice albedo. While extensive research has been completed to identify likely sources of pollutants within the Arctic atmospheric, facilitated by the relative abundance of long-term atmospheric sampling campaigns, only a limited number of studies have directly focussed on the sourcing of Arctic snow pollutants and these are dominated by short-term, spatially-distributed snow sampling. An intensive temporally-refined sampling campaign of Arctic snow at Alert, Nunavut is underway. High frequency sampling at an average of 4.5 day intervals is being conducted from September, 2014 to May, 2015 (expected end date). Broad speciation of these samples coupled with stringent quality assurance will measure carbonaceous species, metals, organics, major ions, and single-particle composition for a temporal profile of light-absorbing species fluxes and co-emitted species indicative of different source types. The sourcing technique positive matrix factorization (PMF) will be applied to this dataset, as the first application of this technique to temporally-refined Arctic snow measurements of light-absorbing species. This presentation will summarise initial results from this integrated analysis of Arctic snow along with the preliminary insight into the sources that are thereby revealed.