Biomass burning organic aerosol in Europe and Asia: Molecular composition and impact on air quality

生物质燃烧向大气中排放大量有机气溶胶颗粒。重要的来源是欧洲燃烧木材用于房屋供暖，以及亚洲在收获季节焚烧农业废弃物。这些排放物对空气质量产生严重影响，并可能对人类健康产生不利影响。除了由火灾直接排放的初级颗粒外，挥发性有机气体形成的二次有机气溶胶在烟羽的运输和化学老化过程中起着重要作用。这些化学转化中的大多数，以及生物质燃烧产生的初级和次级排放物的详细化学成分，目前还没有得到很好的了解。在这个项目中，生物质燃烧排放及其大气处理将在烟雾室和真实大气中进行研究。几种欧洲木材和亚洲秸秆将作为室内实验的燃料。它们在燃烧过程中的排放将在不同的条件下进行化学处理，这些条件是典型的，例如白天和夜间大气化学，污染的城市和污染较轻的农村地区，以及干燥和潮湿的气团。初级和次级形成的粒子都将被分析其分子组成。考虑到生物质燃烧有机气溶胶的化学复杂性，德国和日本两个成熟实验室的互补方法将在这个联合项目中结合起来，以实现前所未有的全面表征。从室内研究中确定的化合物和化学指纹将与来自德国和日本的木材或农业废弃物燃烧的高影响气团的真实样本进行比较。目标是更好地量化生物质燃烧排放物对空气质量的影响，利用室内研究的详细化学信息和真实样本以及用于来源分配的多元统计模型。

Biomass burning emits large amounts of organic aerosol particles into the atmosphere. Important sources are the burning of wood for house heating in Europe and the field burning of agricultural waste during the harvesting season in Asia. These emissions have a strong impact on air quality and can have adverse effects on human health. Besides primary particles which are directly emitted by the fire, the formation of secondary organic aerosols from volatile organic gases plays an important role during transport and chemical aging of smoke plumes. Most of these chemical transformations, as well as the detailed chemical composition of primary and secondary emissions from biomass burning are not well understood at present.In this project, biomass burning emissions and their atmospheric processing will be studied both in a smog chamber and in the real atmosphere.Several European wood and Asian straw types will serve as fuels for the chamber experiments. Their emissions during burning will be chemically processed under different conditions, which are typical e.g. for day- and night atmospheric chemistry, polluted urban and less polluted rural areas, as well as dry and humid air masses. Both the primary as well as the secondary formed particles will then be analysed for their molecular composition. Given the chemical complexity of biomass burning organic aerosols, complementary methods from two well-established labs in Germany and Japan will be combined in this joint project, to allow for an unprecedentedly comprehensive characterisation. The identified compounds and chemical fingerprints from the chamber studies will be compared with real samples from air masses with high impact of wood or agricultural waste burning from Germany and Japan. The goal is to better quantify the impact of biomass burning emissions to air quality, making use of the detailed chemical information from chamber studies and real samples and multivariate statistical models for source apportionment.