Haque Md Mozammel, Zhang Yan-Lin, Deshmukh Dhananjay K, Lee Meehye, Kawamura Kimitaka
Atmospheric Environment Center, Joint Laboratory for International Cooperation on Climate and Environmental Change, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China; School of Applied Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, China; Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0819, Japan.
Atmospheric Environment Center, Joint Laboratory for International Cooperation on Climate and Environmental Change, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China; School of Applied Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, China.
Sci Total Environ. 2024 Feb 1;910:168590. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.168590. Epub 2023 Nov 16.
Anthropogenic activities release substantial amounts of organic components into the atmosphere. In this study, eight groups of organic compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), hopanes, steranes, n-alkanes, fatty acids, fatty alcohols, phthalate esters, and lignin and resin acids were identified in the ambient aerosol samples collected from a regional background site in the Korean Climate Observatory at Gosan (KCOG), South Korea. The total identified organics were most abundant in winter (220 ± 60.3 ng m), followed by spring, autumn, and summer, with the predominance of n-fatty acids. All classes of aliphatic lipid components showed a significant positive correlation with fossil fuel-derived organic carbon (OC-FF) and biomass burning-derived organic carbon (OC-BB), indicating that they were abundantly emitted from anthropogenic sources such as fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning. The composition profiles and diagnostic ratios of PAHs indicate that they were largely derived from coal and/or biomass combustion in the continent. In contrast, hopanes are predominantly emitted from gasoline or diesel engines, particularly in the summer, from commercial ships. The high concentration of phthalates in the summer suggested that plastic emissions from the open ocean substantially contributed to the Gosan aerosols. The low ratios of unsaturated/saturated fatty acids indicate that Gosan organic aerosols were photochemically aged during atmospheric transport. The temporal and seasonal variations of organic species over KCOG provide crucial information on the emission strengths of different contributing sources in the East Asian outflow. Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) results and C-based source apportionment studies demonstrated that anthropogenically derived organic aerosols largely contributed to the aerosol mass over KCOG. Thus, the East Asian continent might be the major source region for organic aerosols over the western North Pacific, except in the summer.
