10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
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Particle Concentration and Particle Size Distribution in an Urban and an Agricultural Sites in Colombia
LADY MATEUS, Angela Vargas, Jennifer Marin, Nestor Rojas, German Ruega, Rodrigo Jimenez, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Abstract Number: 1576 Working Group: Air Quality in Megacities: from Sources to Control
Abstract Particulate matter is the main air pollutant in most of the sites with air quality monitoring in Colombia. Urban PM pollution was associated with more than 10,000 premature death cases and 68 million reported symptoms and hospital visits in 2015, accounting for 1.93% of the National GDP. Despite its importance, PM has not been well characterized. Chemical speciation has been scarce, for a few source apportionment studies, and particle size distribution has been measured only in a couple of studies.
In this study, we measured Particle Concentrations (PC) and Particle Number Size Distributions (PNSD) at two sites with significantly different features. The first 2 sites were located in air quality monitoring stations in Bogota, a city with 8 million inhabitants and nearly 2-million vehicles and motorcycles, considered as one of the most densely populated cities in Latin America. One of the sites was in an urban-background area and the other was affected by traffic and industrial emissions. The third site was located on a building rooftop at the National University campus in Palmira, a city with 350,000 inhabitants in the Cauca river Valley in southwestern Colombia, the center of the sugar cane agroindustry in the country. Pre-harvest burning occurs frequently around Palmira, emitting significant amounts or PM.
We used an Electrical Low-Pressure Impactor – ELPI+ (Dekati, Finland) to examine weekly and diurnal cycles of PC and changes in PNSD that show the influence of different sources and atmospheric effects. Preliminary results show that PC in Bogota’s urban background are between 3,637 and 23,040, with an arithmetic average of 10,910, with peaks during traffic rush hours. In Palmira, PC ranges between 7,809 and 35,837, with an arithmetic average of 20,903, with peaks at different times, mostly between 5 and 10 a.m. and between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m. at night. The PNSD are very dynamic in Palmira and Bogota, the small particles with an aerodynamic diameter between 10 and 100 nm increase at night until 60000 and 12000 particles/cm3, respectively.