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  • Title: O/C and OM/OC ratios of primary, secondary, and ambient organic aerosols with high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometry.
    Author: Aiken AC, Decarlo PF, Kroll JH, Worsnop DR, Huffman JA, Docherty KS, Ulbrich IM, Mohr C, Kimmel JR, Sueper D, Sun Y, Zhang Q, Trimborn A, Northway M, Ziemann PJ, Canagaratna MR, Onasch TB, Alfarra MR, Prevot AS, Dommen J, Duplissy J, Metzger A, Baltensperger U, Jimenez JL.
    Journal: Environ Sci Technol; 2008 Jun 15; 42(12):4478-85. PubMed ID: 18605574.
    Abstract:
    A recently developed method to rapidly quantify the elemental composition of bulk organic aerosols (OA) using a high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-ToF-AMS) is improved and applied to ambient measurements. Atomic oxygen-to-carbon (O/C) ratios characterize the oxidation state of OA, and O/C from ambient urban OA ranges from 0.2 to 0.8 with a diurnal cycle that decreases with primary emissions and increases because of photochemical processing and secondary OA (SOA) production. Regional O/C approaches approximately 0.9. The hydrogen-to-carbon (H/C, 1.4--1.9) urban diurnal profile increases with primary OA (POA) as does the nitrogen-to-carbon (N/C, approximately 0.02). Ambient organic-mass-to-organic-carbon ratios (OM/OC) are directly quantified and correlate well with O/C (R2 = 0.997) for ambient OA because of low N/C. Ambient O/C and OM/OC have values consistent with those recently reported from other techniques. Positive matrix factorization applied to ambient OA identifies factors with distinct O/C and OM/OC trends. The highest O/C and OM/OC (1.0 and 2.5, respectively) are observed for aged ambient oxygenated OA, significantly exceeding values for traditional chamber SOA,while laboratory-produced primary biomass burning OA (BBOA) is similar to ambient BBOA, O/C of 0.3--0.4. Hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA), a surrogate for urban combustion POA, has the lowest O/C (0.06--0.10), similar to vehicle exhaust. An approximation for predicting O/C from unit mass resolution data is also presented.
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