Size distribution, sources and chemistry of ultrafine particles at Barcelona-El Prat Airport, Spain.

The rapid expansion of the aviation sector raises concerns about air quality impacts within and around airports. Ultrafine particles (UFP, diameter < 100 nm) are of particular concern due to their potential adverse health effects. In this study, particle number concentrations (PNC), particle number size distribution (PNSD), and other ancillary pollutants such as particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NOX), black carbon (BC), sulfur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO) and benzene, as well as organic markers and trace elements (in quasi-UFP) were measured at Barcelona-El Prat Airport (80 m and 250 m from the main taxiway and runway). Comparisons were made with an urban background (UB) location, and source apportionment of PNSD was performed using Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF). PNC inside the airport was nine-fold higher than the UB, and fifteen-fold higher when considering only nucleation mode particles (< 25 nm). Six sources contributing to PNC were identified inside the airport: Taxiing (48.7 %; mode diameter = 17 nm), Industrial/Shipping (7.4 %; mode diameter = 35 nm), Diesel (3.9 %; mode diameter = 64 nm), Regional recirculation (1.1 %; mode diameter = 100 nm), Photonucleation (16.6 %; mode diameter = 13 nm) and Takeoff (18.5 %; mode diameter = 23 nm). Due to the measurement location and prevailing wind patterns, no significant contributions from landings were detected. Chemical analysis of quasi-UFP collected on Electrical Low-Pressure Impactor (ELPI + ) filters (stages 2 to 6: 17-165 nm) revealed higher concentrations (> 2-fold) of Fe, Al, Cr, Cu, Mo, Mn, Pb, Ti, and Sb at the airport compared to the UB, with Al exhibiting the most pronounced disparity. Generally, PAH levels were low at both sites, although concentrations were higher at the airport relative to the UB. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of UFP within a major European airport, identifying the different sources contributing to PNC and PNSD.

Particle number size distributions and concentrations in transportation environments: a review.

Ambient air ultrafine particles (UFP, particles with a diameter <100 nm) have gained significant attention in World Health Organization (WHO) air quality guidelines and European legislation. This review explores UFP concentrations and particle number size distributions (PNC-PNSD) in various transportation hotspots, including road traffic, airports, harbors, trains, and urban commuting modes (walking, cycling, bus, tram, and subway). The results highlight the lack of information on personal exposure at harbors and railway stations, inside airplanes and trains, and during various other commuting modes. The different lower particle size limits of the reviewed measurements complicate direct comparisons between them. Emphasizing the use of instruments with detection limits ≤10 nm, this review underscores the necessity of following standardized UFP measurement protocols. Road traffic sites are shown to exhibit the highest PNC within cities, with PNC and PNSD in commuting modes driven by the proximity to road traffic and weather conditions. In closed environments, such as cars, buses, and trams, increased external air infiltration for ventilation correlates with elevated PNC and a shift in PNSD toward smaller diameters. Airports exhibit particularly elevated PNCs near runways, raising potential concerns about occupational exposure. Recommendations from this study include maintaining a substantial distance between road traffic and other commuting modes, integrating air filtration into ventilation systems, implementing low-emission zones, and advocating for a general reduction in road traffic to minimize daily UFP exposure. Our findings provide important insights for policy assessments and underscore the need for additional research to address current knowledge gaps.

Aerosol source apportionment uncertainty linked to the choice of input chemical components.

For a Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) aerosol source apportionment (SA) studies there is no standard procedure to select the most appropriate chemical components to be included in the input dataset for a given site typology, nor specific recommendations in this direction. However, these choices are crucial for the final SA outputs not only in terms of number of sources identified but also, and consequently, in the source contributions estimates. In fact, PMF tends to reproduce most of PM mass measured independently and introduced as a total variable in the input data, regardless of the percentage of PM mass which has been chemically characterized, so that the lack of some specific source tracers (e.g. levoglucosan) can potentially affect the results of the whole source apportionment study. The present study elaborates further on the same concept, evaluating quantitatively the impact of lacking specific sources' tracers on the whole source apportionment, both in terms of identified sources and source contributions. This work aims to provide first recommendations on the most suitable and critical components to be included in PMF analyses in order to reduce PMF output uncertainty as much as possible, and better represent the most commons PM sources observed in many sites in Western countries. To this aim, we performed three sensitivity analyses on three different datasets across EU, including extended sets of organic tracers, in order to cover different types of urban conditions (Mediterranean, Continental, and Alpine), source types, and PM fractions. Our findings reveal that the vehicle exhaust source resulted to be less sensitive to the choice of analytes, although source contributions estimates can deviate significantly up to 44 %. On the other hand, for the detection of the non-exhaust one is clearly necessary to analyze specific inorganic elements. The choice of not analysing non-polar organics likely causes the loss of separation of exhaust and non-exhaust factors, thus obtaining a unique road traffic source, which provokes a significant bias of total contribution. Levoglucosan was, in most cases, crucial to identify biomass burning contributions in Milan and in Barcelona, in spite of the presence of PAHs in Barcelona, while for the case of Grenoble, even discarding levoglucosan, the presence of PAHs allowed identifying the BB factor. Modifying the rest of analytes provoke a systematic underestimation of biomass burning source contributions. SIA factors resulted to be generally overestimated with respect to the base case analysis, also in the case that ions were not included in the PMF analysis. Trace elements were crucial to identify shipping emissions (V and Ni) and industrial sources (Pb, Ni, Br, Zn, Mn, Cd and As). When changing the rest of input variables, the uncertainty was narrow for shipping but large for industrial processes. Major and trace elements were also crucial to identify the mineral/soil factor at all cities. Biogenic SOA and Anthropogenic SOA factors were sensitive to the presence of their molecular tracers, since the availability of OC alone is unable to separate a SOA factor. Arabitol and sorbitol were crucial to detecting fungal spores while odd number of higher alkanes (C27 to C31) for plant debris.