Assessing the Accuracy and Reliability of a New Ambient Ultrafine Particle Monitor for Quantifying Total Particle Number Concentration at Three ASCENT Sites

DAVID HAGAN, Can Barut, Sohyeon Jeon, Ruizhe Liu, Nga Lee Ng, Haroula D. Baliaka, Vine Blankenship, Ryan Ward, Purushottam Kumar, John Seinfeld, Richard Flagan, Mitchell Rogers, Lijin Zhang, Tori Hass-Mitchell, Taekyu Joo, Drew Gentner, QuantAQ, Inc.

     Abstract Number: 166
     Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods

Abstract
Air sensors and air sensor networks have become widely used for measuring criteria air pollutants such as PM_2.5, CO, NO₂, and O₃. The use of air monitoring networks has been instrumental in beginning to understand and quantify the impacts of source-specific air pollutants in previously unmonitored or insufficiently monitored communities. Although not currently regulated in the United States, ultrafine particles (UFPs) are a major concern for human health and are not currently measured regularly by monitoring agencies, partly due to the cost and complexity of making such measurements. Recently, a lower-cost, lower-power water-based condensation particle counter (CPC) was developed by Aerosol Dynamics (Berkeley, CA) that has the opportunity to make these measurements more accessible and improve our understanding of UFPs and their impact on human health. In this work, we compare initial co-location results for QuantAQ’s implementation of this CPC at three ASCENT (Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork) sites: Atlanta, Pico Rivera, and Queens College (NY), wherein results collected by the QuantAQ MODULAIR-UFP are compared to a standard TSI water-based CPC.