Incorporation of Radon-222 as a parameter in ME-2 to improve apportionment of PM2.5 sources in the Sydney region
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Date
2015-12-01
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
In recent years source apportionment of observed PM2.5 has been improved by incorporating meteorological
information as additional factors in receptor modelling studies using ME-2. In this study we
replace one of these meteorological factors, namely, parameterisation by wind speed, with a parameterisation
based on hourly observations of the naturally occurring terrestrial gas Radon-222 (radon), and
compare results of the two parameterisations over five years at an inland site in the Greater Sydney
Region.
The efficacy of the wind speed and radon parameterisation techniques is assessed by comparing regressions
between the daily contributions from identified elemental fingerprints estimated from the
wind speed and radon multi-linear models against those obtained from the corresponding bi-linear
model (while the two models are solved simultaneously).
The radon parameterisation yielded improved regressions for all source fingerprints, most notably
Smoke and Autos (r2 ¼ 0.67 and 0.65, respectively, compared to 0.57 and 0.47 when the wind speed
parameterisationwas used). Both parameterisation schemes were equally effective in attributing PM2.5 to
wind sectors known to contain sources characterised by the observed fingerprints.
Our findings demonstrate that incorporating radon as a parameter in ME-2 can lead to an improved
PM2.5 source apportionment than that obtained using meteorological parameters alone, particularly for
inland sites with distributed sources. © 2013, Elsevier Ltd.
Description
Keywords
Ion beams, Wind, Radon 222, Meteorology, Receptors, Fine particles, Simulation
Citation
Crawford, J., Cohen, D. D., Chambers, S., Williams, A., & Stelcer, E. (2013). Incorporation of Radon-222 as a parameter in ME-2 to improve apportionment of PM2.5 sources in the Sydney region. Atmospheric Environment, 80, 378-388. doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2013.08.015