Mass size distribution of carbon in atmospheric humic-like substances and water soluble organic carbon for an urban environment
Highlights
► Mass size distributions of WSOC and HULIS-C are trimodal. ► Condensation and droplet submodes, and coarse mode are identified. ► 80% of total WSOC and HULIS-C concentrations are associated with fine particles. ► Relative concentrations of the submodes likely depend on the environment. ► Contributions of the coarse mode to WSOC and HULIS-C concentrations are important.
Section snippets
Introduction and objectives
Water-soluble chemical compounds including both inorganic and organic constituents in fine-sized atmospheric aerosol particles play an important role in the biogeochemical cycling of water and other substances (Ramanathan et al., 2001, Mahowald, 2011), climate (Facchini, Mircea, Fuzzi, & Charlson, 1999), and several other environmental processes (Fuzzi et al., 2006). The effects of inorganic salts are well documented, while the organic compounds still represent a challenge. This is caused by
Collection of aerosol samples
An aerosol sample collection and measurement campaign was conducted in central Budapest (5, Rákóczi Street, latitude 47°29’37” N, longitude 19°03’38” E, altitude 111 m above the mean sea level) at a kerbside site within a street canyon from 23 April through 5 May 2002 (Salma et al., 2001, Salma et al., 2010). Mean traffic flow of motor vehicles in both directions at the site (obtained from loop counting) over the campaign was 2.0×103 h−1. The samplings and measurements were performed at a height
Mass size distribution of WSOC
The mass size distribution of WSOC obtained from the combined impactor stages is shown in Fig. 1. It represents the average size distribution for 12 days. The distribution consists of three modes. The coarse mode has a GMAD of 6.4 μm, and its concentration represents 21% of the total WSOC concentration. This relative contribution is considerable. The WSOC-containing coarse particles are usually associated with mechanical disintegration processes such as soil erosion and dispersion, and
Conclusions
The mass size distributions of WSOC and water-soluble HULIS-C for an urban environment in springtime contained three modes. About 80% of both the WSOC and HULIS-C concentrations were apportioned to fine particles. The accumulation mode was split into two submodes due to water processing, similarly for major ionic constituents. Abundances of the submodes likely depend on ambient RHs, water uptake properties and age of particles, and on pollutant gases. Therefore, the extent of the environmental
Acknowledgements
Financial support by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (contract K84091) and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office is appreciated. The authors are indebted to J. Cafmeyer of Ghent University for collection of the aerosol samples, and L. Jurecska of the Eötvös University for assistance in the TOC measurements.
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Cited by (22)
The role of humic-like substances as atmospheric surfactants in the formation of summer-heavy rainfall in downtown Tokyo
2019, City and Environment InteractionsCitation Excerpt :Lin et al. [62] reported the presence of HULIS in the accumulation mode (0.32–0.56 μm), which accounted for up to 28% of WSOC in rural China. Salma et al. [63] observed that 51% of HULIS carbon had a peak particle size of 0.31 μm (accumulation mode) in Budapest, Hungary. We also observed the presence of HULIS during the accumulation mode at our sampling sites (unpublished data).
Sources of humic-like substances (HULIS) in PM <inf>2.5</inf> in Beijing: Receptor modeling approach
2019, Science of the Total EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :A plot of the wind rose for the days on which samples were collected is provided in Fig. S1 of the Supplemental material. HULIS was isolated using the extraction method developed by Varga et al. (2001) and used in many other studies (Fan et al., 2012; Feczko et al., 2007; Krivácsy et al., 2008; Lin et al., 2010; Lin and Yu, 2011; Nguyen et al., 2014; Salma et al., 2013; Song et al., 2012). The separation procedure is provided in Supporting information Section S1.
Mass size distribution of major monosaccharide anhydrides and mass contribution of biomass burning
2019, Atmospheric ResearchCitation Excerpt :The perspective results can have relevance mainly for refining the source apportionment methods based specifically on monosaccharide anhydrides from BB. In earlier aerosol studies in Budapest, atmospheric concentrations, contributions and mass size distributions of several relevant carbonaceous chemical species were determined (e.g. Salma et al., 2004, 2007, 2013; Claeys et al., 2012), and source apportionment of major carbonaceous species to fossil fuel (FF) combustion, BB and biogenic emissions was realised by a coupled radiocarbon-levoglucosan marker method (Salma et al., 2017). Size distributions of carbonaceous molecular markers of BB (namely LVG and its stereoisomers) and related important information have been missing internationally.
Seasonal variability of carbon in humic-like matter of ambient size-segregated water soluble organic aerosols from urban background environment
2018, Atmospheric EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :On the other hand, the distribution pattern of HULIS-C for summer is quite different than that for the WSOC, indicating that different formation pathways attributed to the observed WSOC and HULIS-C concentrations (Fig. 3d, f). For the coarse mode, which accounted for 10% in the autumn, but reached nearly 30% of the total HULIS-C in spring and over 20% in summer (Fig. 4a), the major source could be assigned to primary emissions of aged material deposited on the ground enhanced by mechanical processes (Salma et al., 2013), but also could be the result of wind driven transport of plant fragments, such as pollen and other particles of biological origin (Jaenicke, 2005), due to their increased production during spring time. The ultrafine mode was low during cold periods; however, its contribution to the total HULIS-C in warmer seasons, especially in summer, was relatively high (27%) (Fig. 4a).
New insights on humic-like substances associated with wintertime urban aerosols from central and southern Europe: Size-resolved chemical characterization and optical properties
2017, Atmospheric EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :In general, the mass size distribution can be divided in two modes the accumulation (∼0.1–2 μm) and the coarse mode (∼2–50 μm), while the former is consisted of two overlapping submodes: the condensation and the droplet mode (Seinfeld and Pandis, 1998). Previous studies identified a tri-modal distribution for WSOC and HULIS corresponding to these modes with the condensation mode (GMAD ∼0.31 μm) being the most prominent in Budapest during the warm period (Salma et al., 2013), and the droplet mode (MMAD ∼0.75 μm) dominating in Pearl River Delta (PRD, China) during crop residue burning (Lin et al., 2010). In this study, assuming that the ≤0.49 μm size fraction corresponds to the condensation mode, the 0.49–0.95 μm fraction to the droplet mode, and the >0.95 μm fraction to the coarse mode, it appears that at all sampling sites the condensation and the droplet modes comprised 18–31% and 50–64% of total WSOC and HULIS-C normalized masses, respectively, while the portion found in the coarse mode (15–20%) is not negligible for urban and suburban environments.