ACPD Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ACPD 1680-7375 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acpd-11-1219-2011 Quantification of aerosol chemical composition using continuous single particle measurements Jeong C.-H. 1 McGuire M. L. 1 Godri K. J. 2 Slowik J. G. 1 Rehbein P. J. G. 1 Evans G. J. 1 Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research, University of Toronto, 200 College Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3E5, Canada Division of Environmental Health & Risk Management, School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK 17 01 2011 11 1 1219 1264 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/11/1219/2011/acpd-11-1219-2011.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/11/1219/2011/acpd-11-1219-2011.pdf

Mass concentrations of particulate matter (PM) chemical components were determined from data for 0.3 to 3.0 μm particles measured by an Aerosol Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (ATOFMS) data at an urban and rural site. Hourly-averaged concentrations of nitrate, sulphate, ammonium, organic carbon, and elemental carbon, estimated based on scaled ATOFMS peak intensities of corresponding ion marker species, were compared with collocated chemical composition measurements by an Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS), a Gas-Particle Ion Chromatograph (GPIC), and a Sunset Lab field OCEC analyzer. The highest correlation was found for nitrate, with correlation coefficients (Pearson <i>r</i>) of 0.89 and 0.85 at the urban and rural sites, respectively. ATOFMS mass calibration factors, determined for the urban site, were used to calculate mass concentrations of the major PM chemical components at the rural site. Mass reconstruction using this ATOFMS based composition data agreed very well with the total PM mass measured at the rural site. Size distributions of the ten main types of particles were resolved for the rural site and the mass composition of each particle type was determined in terms of sulphate, nitrate, ammonium, organic carbon and elemental carbon. This is the first study to estimate hourly mass concentrations of individual aerosol components and the mass composition of individual particle-types based on ATOFMS single particle measurements.

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