Environmental Monitoring Handbook
This handbook helps you with the most pervasive activity in environmental science --taking and analyzing environmental samples from water, air or soil.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Environmental Monitoring Handbook
Chapter 22: Aerosol Sampling And Analysis
Paulo Artaxo
Introduction
Sampling and analysis of atmospheric aerosol particles are a particularly difficult task. The large diversity of particle types, sources, and processes that regulate the physical and chemical properties of atmospheric particles makes their environmental monitoring a challenging task. These particles come in many different forms, such as dust, fume, mist, smoke, fog, and others. Many of the aerosol particles are from natural sources such as soil dust, marine aerosols, and biogenic, volcanic, and other particles as well as anthropogenic particles such as sulfates, fly ash from power plant emissions, and automobile emissions, which are pres-ent in urban and remote areas of our planet. These aerosols affect human health and quality of life as well as visibility, radiation balance, climate, cloud formation, nutrient cycling, ecosystem health, and many other key aspects of the global earth system. These issues generate a need for accurate and widespread monitoring of atmospheric aerosols to characterize their diverse morphology, density, and elemental composition over their large size range that reaches about six orders of magnitude from 0.001 to 100 m (1 m is 10 6 m).
Physical And Chemical Properties Of Aerosol Particles
We can characterize particles by their physical and chemical properties, including shape and size, light scattering, elemental properties, and dynamic behavior. Characterizing particle size distributions is one of the most important elements of an aerosol monitoring program. The size of the particles governs much of the particle chemistry, filter collection efficiency, lung deposition, light scattering, and other key properties.
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