Abstract. Over the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in short-term events that negatively affect air quality such as bonfires and fireworks. High aerosol and gas concentrations generated from public bonfires/fireworks were measured in order to understand the night-time chemical processes and their atmospheric implications. Nitrate chemistry was observed during the bonfire night with nitrogen containing compounds in both gas and aerosol phase and further N2O5 and ClNO2 concentrations, which depleted early next morning due to photolysis of NO3 radicals, ceasing production. Particulate organic nitrate (PON) concentrations of 2.8 μg.m−3 were estimated using the m/z 46:30 ratios from AMS measurements, according to previously published methods. ME-2 source apportionment was performed to determine organic aerosol concentrations from different sources after modifying the fragmentation table and it was possible to identify two PON factors representing primary (pPON_ME2) and secondary (sPON_ME2) contributions. A slight improvement in the agreement between the source apportionment of the AMS and a collocated AE-31 Aethalometer was observed after modifying the prescribed fragmentation in the AMS organic spectrum (the fragmentation table) to determine PON sources, which resulted in an r2 = 0.865 between BBOA and babs_470wb compared to an r2 = 0.819 obtained without the modification. Correlations between OA sources and measurements made using Time of Flight Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometry with an iodide adduct ion were performed in order to determine possible gas tracers to be used in future ME-2 analyses to constrain solutions. During bonfire night, high correlations (r2) were observed between BBOA and methacrylic acid (0.915), Acrylic acid (0.901), nitrous acid (0.864), propionic acid, (0.851) and Hydrogen cyanide (0.755). A series of oxygenated species, chlorine compounds as well as cresol showed good correlations with sPON_ME2 and the low volatility oxygenated organic aerosol (LVOOA) factor during an episode with low pollutant concentrations. Further analysis of pPON_ME2 and sPON_ME2 was performed in order to determine whether these PON sources absorb light near the UV region using an Aethalometer. This hypothesis was tested by doing multilinear regressions between babs_470wb and BBOA, sPON_ME2 and pPON_ME2. Our results suggest that sPON_ME2 does not absorb light at 470 nm while pPON_ME2 and LVOOA absorb light at 470 nm over that of black carbon. This may inform black carbon (BC) source apportionment studies from Aethalometer measurements, through investigation of the brown carbon contribution to babs_470wb.
Sources of black carbon at residential and traffic environments obtained by two source apportionment methods
