Development and evaluation of an improved offline aerosol mass spectrometry technique

Abstract

Abstract. The offline aerosol mass spectrometry technique is a useful tool for the source apportionment of organic aerosol (OA) in areas and periods during which an aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) is not available. However, the technique is based on the extraction of aerosol samples in water, while several atmospheric OA components are partially or fully insoluble in water. In this work an improved offline technique was developed and evaluated in an effort to capture most of the partially soluble and insoluble organic aerosol material, reducing significantly the uncertainty of the corresponding source apportionment. A major advantage of the proposed approach is that no corrections are needed for the offline analysis to account for the limited water solubility of some OA components. The improved offline AMS analysis was tested in three campaigns: two during winter and one during summer. Collocated online AMS measurements were performed for the evaluation of the offline method. Source apportionment analysis was performed separately for the online and the offline measurements using positive matrix factorization (PMF). The PMF results showed that the fractional contribution of each factor to the total OA differed between the online and the offline PMF results by less than 15 %. The differences in the AMS spectra of the factors of the two approaches could be significant, suggesting that the use of factor profiles from the literature in the offline analysis may lead to complications. Part of the good agreement between the online and the offline PMF results is due to the ability of the improved offline AMS technique to capture a bigger part of the OA, including insoluble organic material. This was evident by the significant fraction of submicrometer suspended insoluble particles present in the water extract and by the reduced insoluble material on the filters after the extraction process. More than half of the elemental carbon (EC) was on average missing from the filters after the water extraction. Significant EC concentrations were measured in the produced aerosol that was used as input to the AMS during the offline analysis.