Organic aerosol components derived from 25 AMS datasets across Europe using a newly developed ME-2 based source apportionment strategy

Abstract

Organic aerosols (OA) represent one of the major constituents of submicron particulatematter (PM1) and comprise a huge variety of compounds emitted by different sources.Three intensive measurement field campaigns to investigate the aerosol chemical com-position all over Europe were carried out within the framework of EUCAARI and the intensive campaigns of EMEP during 2008 (May–June and September–October) and2009 (February–March). In this paper we focus on the identification of the main organicaerosol sources and we propose a standardized methodology to perform source ap-portionment using positive matrix factorization (PMF) with the multilinear engine (ME-2)on Aerodyne aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) data. Our source apportionment procedure is tested and applied on 25 datasets accounting for urban, rural, remote andhigh altitude sites and therefore it is likely suitable for the treatment of AMS-relatedambient datasets. For most of the sites, four organic components are retrieved, im-proving significantly previous source apportionment results where only a separationin primary and secondary OA sources was possible. Our solutions include two primary OA sources, i.e. hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA) and biomass burning OA (BBOA)and two secondary OA components, i.e. semi-volatile oxygenated OA (SV-OOA) andlow-volatility oxygenated OA (LV-OOA). For specific sites cooking-related (COA) andmarine-related sources (MSA) are also separated. Finally, our work provides a largeoverview of organic aerosol sources in Europe and an interesting set of highly time resolved data for modeling evaluation purposes.