COMBINING CHEMICAL AND METEOROLOGICAL DATA TO INFER SOURCE AREAS OF AIRBORNE POLLUTANTS

Models have been developed to identify and quantitatively apportion th e contributions of sources to the measured concentrations of airborne constituents. These models have generally been applied to local, urban scale problems in which the differences in the patterns of elemental concentrations in the emissions of different sources are used to parti tion aerosol mass to the identified sources. However, these models do not provide information on the locations of the sources. New approache s are thus needed to find specifically where airborne contaminant emis sion sources can be found. Using models of atmospheric transport, mete orological information in the form of air parcel back trajectories can be calculated. The trajectories are presented as a series of location s where the air parcels that deliver material to a given sample were a t fixed intervals, backwards in time. If the area covered by these end points is divided into a gridded array, the amount of time spent in a cell is related to the number of endpoint segment locations that fall into that cell. The ratio of the number of endpoints related to high c oncentration samples to the total number of endpoint that fall into th e cell can be considered to be the conditional probability that the pa rticular grid cell was a source of the species found in high concentra tion. This probability is called the potential source contribution fun ction (PSCF). This approach has been applied to three problems of iden tifying the sources of secondary sulfate in particles at different sca le lengths; sub-regional, regional, and semiglobal. At a sub-regional scale in the Los Angeles area of southern California, PSCF analysis wa s applied to measured SO2 and SO42- measured at one site downwind of L os Angeles. Transport of particulate SO42- to Dorset, Ontario was obse rved on a regional scale, and non-marine sulfate contributions to samp les collected in the high Arctic were examined on a semi-global scale. In all cases good agreement was found between the high PSCF cells and previously identified source areas. In each case the analysis helped to provide an improved understanding of the source-receptor relationsh ips for the particular scale length.