V. BERNARDONI

The prototype for an innovative instrument has been built and validated at the Department of Physics, University of Genoa. The purpose of the instrument is to measure the light absorption properties of atmospheric aerosol sampled on a filtering support, over a wide spectral range with a high wavelength resolution. The preliminary tests of the...

Carbonaceous aerosol (CA) plays an important role in many different issues ranging from human health to global climate change. It mainly consists of organic carbon (OC) and elemental carbon (EC) although a minor fraction of carbonate carbon could be also present. Thermal-optical methods (TOT/TOR) are presently the most widespread approach to...

Atmospheric aerosol and gases affect visibility by scattering and absorbing the incoming radiation (Watson, 2002; Pitchford et al, 2007). While the role of gases is relatively well understood, the effect of particulate matter (PM) is more complicated to be assessed since it depends on several factors such as particles size distribution and...

Carbonaceous aerosol is a major component of urban particulate matter (PM), in particular of its finer fractions (PM2.5, PM1). The elemental part, often referred to as EC, is strongly light absorbing: when determined by optical methods it is usually called "black carbon" (BC). The two quantities, EC and BC, do not exactly define the same PM...

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Campioni di PM vengono regolarmente raccolti in area urbana per monitorare i livelli di PM10 e PM2.5, utilizzando campionatori sequenziali a basso volume (LVS) dotati, solitamente, di filtri 47 mm gestiti su base giornaliera. I filtri in PTFE (Teflon®) risultano molto indicati sia per le misure gravimetriche che per l"analisi composizionale del...

Black Carbon (BC) is the main absorber of solar radiation among the aerosol components, it influences cloud processes, and alters the melting of snow and ice cover. On global scale, it is currently identified as the second most important individual climate-warming component after CO2, but uncertainties on the radiative forcing related to...

Carbonaceous aerosol is a major component of the urban PM. It mainly consists of organic carbon (OC) and elemental carbon (EC) although a minor fraction of carbonate carbon could be also present. Elemental carbon is mainly found in the finer PM fractions (PM2.5 and PM1) and it is strongly light absorbing. When determined by optical methods, it...

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We introduce a simple, fully automatic, multi-wavelength and non-destructive optical system, namely a Multi-Wavelength Absorbance Analyzer (MWAA), to measure off-line the light absorption in Particulate Matter (PM) collected on filters and hence to derive the black and brown carbon content in the PM. This gives the opportunity to measure in the...

Accurate and temporally consistent measurements of light absorbing aerosol (LAA) heating rate (HR) and of its source apportionment (fossil-fuel, FF; biomass-burning, BB) and speciation (black and brown Carbon; BC, BrC) are needed to evaluate LAA short-termclimate forcing. For this purpose,wavelength- and time-dependent accurate LAA absorption...

In this paper, a new way to apportion the absorption coefficient (babs) of carbonaceous atmospheric aerosols starting from a multi-wavelength optical analysis is shown. This methodology can disentangle and quantify the contribution to total absorption of equivalent black carbon (EBC) emitted by wood burning (EBCWB) and fossil fuel (EBCFF) as...