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Special Issue for the 9th International Conference on Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere

Carbonaceous particles are a minor constituent of the atmosphere but have a profound effect on air quality, human health, visibility and climate. The importance of carbonaceous particles has been increasingly recognized and become a mainstream topic at numerous conferences. Such was not the case in 1978, when the 1st International Conference on Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere (ICCPA), or ''Carbon Conference'' as it is widely known, was introduced as a new forum to bring together scientists who were just beginning to reveal the importance and complexity of carbonaceous particles in the environment. Table 1 lists the conference dates, venues in the series as well as the proceedings, and special issues resulting form the meetings. Penner and Novakov (Penner and Novakov, 1996) provide an excellent historical perspective to the early ICCPA Conferences. Thirty years later, the ninth in this conference series was held at its inception site, Berkeley, California, attended by 160 scientists from 31 countries, and featuring both new and old themes in 49 oral and 83 poster presentations. Topics covered such areas as historical trends in black carbon aerosol, ambient concentrations, analytic techniques, secondary aerosol formation, biogenic, biomass, and HULIS1 characterization, optical properties, and regional and global climate effects. The conference website, http://iccpa.lbl.gov/, holds the agenda, as well as many presentations, for the 9th ICCPA. The 10th ICCPA is tentatively scheduled for 2011 in Vienna, Austria. The papers in this issue are representative of several of the themes discussed in the conference. Ban-Weiss et al., (Ban-Weiss et al., accepted) measured the abundance of ultrafine particles in a traffic tunnel and found that heavy duty diesel trucks emit at least an order of magnitude more ultrafine particles than light duty gas-powered vehicles per unit of fuel burned. Understanding of this issue is important as ultrafine particles have been shown to ...

Date: December 11, 2009

Creator: Strawa, A.W.; Kirchstetter, T.W. & Puxbaum, H.

Item Type: Article

Partner: UNT Libraries Government Documents Department

Optical and Physical Properties from Primary On-Road Vehicle ParticleEmissions And Their Implications for Climate Change

During the summers of 2004 and 2006, extinction and scattering coefficients of particle emissions inside a San Francisco Bay Area roadway tunnel were measured using a combined cavity ring-down and nephelometer instrument. Particle size distributions and humidification were also measured, as well as several gas phase species. Vehicles in the tunnel traveled up a 4% grade at a speed of approximately 60 km h{sup -1}. The traffic situation in the tunnel allows the apportionment of emission factors between light duty gasoline vehicles and diesel trucks. Cross-section emission factors for optical properties were determined for the apportioned vehicles to be consistent with gas phase and particulate matter emission factors. The absorption emission factor (the absorption cross-section per mass of fuel burned) for diesel trucks (4.4 {+-} 0.79 m{sup 2} kg{sup -1}) was 22 times larger than for light-duty gasoline vehicles (0.20 {+-} 0.05 m{sup 2} kg{sup -1}). The single scattering albedo of particles - which represents the fraction of incident light that is scattered as opposed to absorbed - was 0.2 for diesel trucks and 0.3 for light duty gasoline vehicles. These facts indicate that particulate matter from motor vehicles exerts a positive (i.e., warming) radiative climate forcing. Average particulate mass absorption efficiencies for diesel trucks and light duty gasoline vehicles were 3.14 {+-} 0.88 m{sup 2} g{sub PM}{sup -1} and 2.9 {+-} 1.07 m{sup 2} g{sub PM}{sup -1}, respectively. Particle size distributions and optical properties were insensitive to increases in relative humidity to values in excess of 90%, reinforcing previous findings that freshly emitted motor vehicle particulate matter is hydrophobic.

Date: January 23, 2009

Creator: Strawa, A.W.; Kirchstetter, T.W.; Hallar, A.G.; Ban-Weiss, G.A.; McLaughlin, J.P.; Harley, R.A. et al.