Air pollution in the shore zone of a Large Alpine Lake – 1 – Road dust and urban aerosols at Lake Tahoe, California–Nevada

Concentrated human activity and limited atmospheric mixing create a high potential for airborne pollutant impacts to alpine lakes developed as mountain resorts. Lake Tahoe is a major alpine resort straddling the California–Nevada border, receiving more than two million visitors each year. The lake’s clarity has declined substantially since the inception of intense development in the Tahoe basin in the 1970s. The 2002–2004 Lake Tahoe Atmospheric Deposition Study (LTADS) was conducted as part of a multi-agency effort to develop a water quality management plan for the lake. Estimating aerosol deposition to the lake requires detailed knowledge of the spatial and temporal patterns of aerosol concentration, size distribution, and chemical composition over the entire basin – and developing a management plan requires also that the sources of the aerosols be known with considerable specificity. In lieu of the intensive measurement network implied by this level of detail, we hypothesized that a set of measurements to characterized the temporal, spatial, and size distribution patterns of particles in ambient air and in local emissions in the vicinity of Lake Tahoe could be used to extrapolate long time series of simple measurements to an annual aerosol deposition computation. Here we report the results of our detailed aerosol measurement campaign. Our results show that there are strong systematic and repeating gradients in aerosol loading that occur as functions of location, land use, traffic activity, and time of day, and that road dust is a major source of aerosols around the lake. In addition, we observed strong consistency of particle size distributions as a function of source type, largely independent of particle concentrations. Finally, we demonstrated the use of particle counters to directly observe downwind dispersion and deposition of particles. Together, these findings support the use of imputed location- and time-specific size distributions in annual aerosol deposition calculations, even though particle size distributions were not directly measured in the LTADS baseline monitoring program, and that program was conducted at only a limited set of sites in the Tahoe basin.Two companion articles in this journal issue describe the overall findings of the LTADS study (Dolislager et al., “Overview of the Lake Tahoe Atmospheric Deposition Study”) and the results of measurements taken on the lake itself (VanCuren et al., “Air Pollution in the Shore Zone of a Large Alpine Lake – 2 – Local and Regional Pollutant Distribution over Lake Tahoe California–Nevada”).