O/C and OM/OC Ratios of Primary, Secondary, and Ambient Organic Aerosols with...

Aiken, A. C., P. F. DeCarlo, J. H. Kroll, D. Worsnop, J. A. Huffman, K. S. Docherty, I. Ulbrich, C. Mohr, J. R. Kimmel, D. Sueper, Y. Sun, Q. Zhang, A. Trimborn, M. Northway, P. J. Ziemann, M. R. Canagaratna, T. B. Onasch, M. R. Alfarra, A. S. H. Prevot, J. Dommen, J. Duplissy, A. Metzger, U. Baltensperger, and J. Jimenez-Palacios (2008), O/C and OM/OC Ratios of Primary, Secondary, and Ambient Organic Aerosols with High-Resolution Time-of-Flight Aerosol Mass Spectrometry, Environ. Sci. Technol., 42, 4478-4485, doi:10.1021/es703009q.
Abstract: 

increases with primary OA (POA) as does the nitrogen-tocarbon (N/C, ∼0.02). Ambient organic-mass-to-organic-carbon ratios (OM/OC) are directly quantified and correlate well with O/C (R2 ) 0.997) for ambient OA because of low N/C. Ambient O/C and OM/OC have values consistent with those recently reported from other techniques. Positive matrix factorization applied to ambient OA identifies factors with distinct O/C and OM/OC trends. The highest O/C and OM/OC (1.0 and 2.5, respectively) are observed for aged ambient oxygenated OA, significantly exceeding values for traditional chamberSOA,whilelaboratory-producedprimarybiomassburning OA (BBOA) is similar to ambient BBOA, O/C of 0.3–0.4. Hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA), a surrogate for urban combustion POA, has the lowest O/C (0.06–0.10), similar to vehicle exhaust. An approximation for predicting O/C from unit mass resolution data is also presented.

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Research Program: 
Tropospheric Composition Program (TCP)
Mission: 
MILAGRO