Quantifying road dust resuspension in urban environment by Multilinear Engine: A comparison with PMF2

Atmospheric PM pollution from traffic comprises not only direct emissions but also non-exhaust emissions because resuspension of road dust that can produce high human exposure to heavy metals, metalloids, and mineral matter. A key task for establishing mitigation or preventive measures is estimating the contribution of road dust resuspension to the atmospheric PM mixture. Several source apportionment studies, applying receptor modeling at urban background sites, have shown the difficulty in identifying a road dust source separately from other mineral sources or vehicular exhausts. The Multilinear Engine (ME-2) is a computer program that can solve the Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) problem. ME-2 uses a programming language permitting the solution to be guided toward some possible targets that can be derived from a priori knowledge of sources (chemical profile, ratios, etc.). This feature makes it especially suitable for source apportionment studies where partial knowledge of the sources is available.In the present study ME-2 was applied to data from an urban background site of Barcelona (Spain) to quantify the contribution of road dust resuspension to PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations. Given that recently the emission profile of local resuspended road dust was obtained (Amato, F., Pandolfi, M., Viana, M., Querol, X., Alastuey, A., Moreno, T., 2009. Spatial and chemical patterns of PM10 in road dust deposited in urban environment. Atmospheric Environment 43 (9), 1650–1659), such a priori information was introduced in the model as auxiliary terms of the object function to be minimized by the implementation of the so-called “pulling equations”.ME-2 permitted to enhance the basic PMF solution (obtained by PMF2) identifying, beside the seven sources of PMF2, the road dust source which accounted for 6.9 μg m−3 (17%) in PM10, 2.2 μg m−3 (8%) of PM2.5 and 0.3 μg m−3 (2%) of PM1. This reveals that resuspension was responsible of the 37%, 15% and 3% of total traffic emissions respectively in PM10, PM2.5 and PM1. Therefore the overall traffic contribution resulted in 18 μg m−3 (46%) in PM10, 14 μg m−3 (51%) in PM2.5 and 8 μg m−3 (48%) in PM1. In PMF2 this mass explained by road dust resuspension was redistributed among the rest of sources, increasing mostly the mineral, secondary nitrate and aged sea salt contributions.