• RI-URBANS Service Tools provide near real-time information on submicron organic aerosols and black carbon source apportionment 

• The demonstration will be tested in the pilot cities of the project during 2023

RI-URBANS has published a report describing the establishment of near-real time source apportionment Service Tools for submicron organic aerosols and black carbon.

The work has been carried out by researchers from INERIS, together with CNRS-LSCE, AERIS-Icare, and Datalystica, as part of Task 1.2 of the project: development and implementation of advanced source apportionment Service Tools.

Carbonaceous particles, including organic aerosols and black carbon, represent a substantial part (typically, in the range of 40-80%) of fine particulate matter in urban environments.

Dataflow to be used in RI-URBANS for Black Carbon and Organic Aerosol near-real time source apportionment. Source: INERIS & co-workers

At ACTRIS national facilities, their in-situ high-time resolution monitoring is usually conducted using aerosol chemical speciation monitors (ACSM) and multi-wavelength aethalometer (AE33), for organic aerosols and black carbon respectively. In the last decades, research activities allowed to development of novel methodologies to identify and quantify the main sources of carbonaceous aerosols measured using these two types of instruments.

“Our task within RI-URBANS was to implement these methodologies at a centralised server to demonstrate their ability to be operated in near-real time and gain knowledge on the sources”, explains Olivier Favez, researcher at INERIS and first author of the report.

RI-URBANS researchers evaluated and applied the most suited source apportionment receptor models for operational applications, considering previous work in FAIRMODE, EMEP, and COLOSSAL.

The document provides pilot functionalities, with operational requirements of the source apportionment software and data transfer/formatting Service Tools for the novel near real-time source apportionment of non-refractory aerosols and black carbon measurements data products, for modelling Service Tools (within the RI-URBANS Work Package 3), pilot applications (Work Package 4) and upscaling activities (Work Package 5).

These Service Tools can be found in the corresponding Deliverable D4 (D1.4):

Image reference: Quantum Ai (https://quantumaitrading.net/)