Biogenic and anthropogenic sources of aerosols at the High Arctic site Villum Research Station

• Published in: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• Main Authors: I. E. Nielsen, H. Skov, A. Massling, A. C. Eriksson, M. Dall'Osto, H. Junninen, N. Sarnela, R. Lange, S. Collier, Q. Zhang, C. D. Cappa, J. K. Nøjgaard
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2019
• Subjects: Physics; QC1-999; Chemistry; QD1-999; Arctic; Greenland; black carbon
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-10239-2019; https://doaj.org/article/512afddac6324821b388f56b6bca8d22

There are limited measurements of the chemical composition, abundance and sources of atmospheric particles in the High Arctic To address this, we report 93 d of soot particle aerosol mass spectrometer (SP-AMS) data collected from 20 February to 23 May 2015 at Villum Research Station (VRS) in northern Greenland (81 ∘ 36 ′ N). During this period, we observed the Arctic haze phenomenon with elevated PM 1 concentrations ranging from an average of 2.3, 2.3 and 3.3 µ g m −3 in February, March and April, respectively, to 1.2 µ g m −3 in May. Particulate sulfate ( <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M8" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow class="chem"><msubsup><mi mathvariant="normal">SO</mi><mn mathvariant="normal">4</mn><mrow><mn mathvariant="normal">2</mn><mo>-</mo></mrow></msubsup></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="29pt" height="17pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="40da026c69d6bb7b362f8aefb7758b92"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="acp-19-10239-2019-ie00001.svg" width="29pt" height="17pt" src="acp-19-10239-2019-ie00001.png"/></svg:svg> ) accounted for 66 % of the non-refractory PM 1 with the highest concentration until the end of April and decreasing in May. The second most abundant species was organic aerosol (OA) (24 %). Both OA and PM 1 , estimated from the sum of all collected species, showed a marked decrease throughout May in accordance with the polar front moving north, together with changes in aerosol removal processes. The highest refractory black carbon (rBC) concentrations were found in the first month of the campaign, averaging 0.2 µ g m −3 . In March and April, rBC averaged 0.1 µ g m −3 while decreasing to 0.02 µ g m −3 in May. Positive matrix factorization (PMF) of the OA mass spectra yielded three factors: (1) a hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol (HOA) factor, which was ...