Air pollution sources of PM10 in Buenos Aires City

Abstract

To elucidate the sources of PM(10) air pollution from the experimental information collected in a local air quality monitoring campaign we have applied two methods, effective variance and genetic algorithms, in the solution of the chemical mass balance. The comparison of these two mathematical approaches show that the identification of the possible sources and the evaluation of its contributions are quite independent of them. The role of possible different sources for major and trace elements and the significance of standardizing available data is also addressed. We also present a simple method for identifying the number of candidate sources, a key element defining the dimension of the search space.

Elemental Composition of Particulate Matter in the Southeastern Brazilian Ceramic Pole by Synchrotron Radiation X-ray Fluorescence Technique (SR-XRF)

“…The heterogeneity of the particle distribution on each filter is expressed by the relative standard deviation of the results from the measurement of the three different positions of the filter. The arithmetic mean of this relative standard deviation for the elements Si, S, K, Ca, Ti, Cr, Mn, Fe, Cu and Zn were 17 29,31,56 and of other South American regions (Santiago, Chile; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Córdoba, Argentina), 27,48,57 nearly all elemental concentrations in PM 10 and PM 2.5 of the present work show significantly lower values than the concentrations obtained in the mentioned studies. The PM sampling for these studies were all realized downtown in cities with a much higher population and thus higher volume of traffic than the city of Rio Claro.…”

“…The PBL is the closest layer of the atmosphere to the surface of the earth and plays an important role for the surface-atmosphere exchanges of air pollutants. 57 The PBL can be related to vertical mixing and thus affecting dilution processes of pollutants, which were emitted near the ground. 62,63 The mid-day mean heights of the PBL in south-east Brazil can show seasonal difference of up to 1000 m in average between dry and rainy season.…”

Elemental analysis of aerosols collected at the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory with PIXE technique complemented with SEM/EDX

“…The concentrations in mass per unit volume of sampled air are calculated from these using the corrected flow rate, sampling time, and the areas of the deposits on the filters. The energies and photo-peaks areas of the resulting PIXE spectra were analyzed with the WinQxas 1.40 computer code developed by IAEA (with modified cross sections for 16 O at 50 MeV [26]). A standard target of the element i with an elemental thickness ðqxÞ S;i [lg/cm 2 ] gives after collection of a total chargeQ S;i :…”

“…where Y S;i is the detected number of X-rays (the area of the peak of the X-line i calculated with WinQxas), q is the charge state of the 16 O ion, e the elemental charge, N A Avogadro's number, A i the atomic mass of target element, e is the absolute detection system efficiency for the X-line of the element i (window absorption is automatically included) and r is the corresponding X-ray production cross section.…”

A comparative study on the varying exposure to atmospheric fine and coarse particles under urban and rural conditions

“…The mean concentration of fine transparent particles in Buenos Aires clearly ranges below that of Berlin and surprisingly almost corresponds to that of the German spas. The comparably low level in Buenos Aires is probably due to a missing regional particle plume (Reich et al, 2009). Such a plume is formed over Central Europe, most frequently because of durable anticyclonic and dry weather conditions (Querol et al, 2001;Wolf-Benning et al, 2009).…”