2016 Volume 31 Issue 4 Pages 287-297
An irregular method is attempted to analyze the source contribution of metallic components and elemental carbon in PM2.5 among “long-range-transport pollutants”, “Asian Dust”, and “locally-emitted pollutants” categories when applying Chemical Mass Balance (CMB) method. In this analysis, source profiles required to run CMB is not supplied from outside, but selected from the long-term dataset of PM2.5 composition measured at Fukuoka (Dazaifu), Japan, during the period of March 2010 through March, 2012. Typical days when PM2.5 aerosol from each source category appears to be dominant are selected in view of areal PM2.5 behavior, light extinction coefficient of non-spherical particles from Lidar data, and NO/NOx concentrations. The CMB analysis applied to two case study periods produced qualitatively consistent result with other indirect measures. The arrival timing of the two long-range transport events in early February, 2011, which was reported in a prior research, was successfully calculated by the CMB source estimation. During a prominent Asian dust event in early May, 2011, the temporal change in the estimated source fraction of air pollutants and Asian Dust agreed qualitatively with that of the fraction of spherical and non-spherical light extinction coefficients of aerosols analyzed from Lidar data.