Particulate Matter and Its Source Apportionment in Peshawar, Northern Pakistan

Abstract

The present work is undertaken to investigate the aerosol volume and mass size distribution, concentration of Particulate Matter (PM) and its source apportionment by using GRIMM spectrometer data in the city of Peshawar, Northern Pakistan. In Peshawar, the concentration of Particulate matter (PM 2.5 and PM 10 ) was noticed to increase day by day due to rapid urbanization and industrialization. The use of several transportation activities, construction of buildings, roads and overhead bridges has badly affected the atmosphere of this region. Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) Model has been used to find out different sources of PM in Peshawar. The data were collected for twenty days in April 2011 for both morning and afternoon periods. It has been observed that the values of aerosol volume size distribution were almost high during morning and afternoon rush hours. The mean concentrations of PM 10 and PM 2.5 were determined to be 480 µg/m 3 and 172 µg/m 3 , respectively. A reasonably significant correlation (R 2 = 0.65) was also found between observed and expected PM mass. The PMF result revealed five (05) sources in Peshawar, which were re-suspended road/soil dust, vehicular, industrial, brick kiln emission and household combustion emission.

Source Apportionment of PM10 at an Urban Site of a South Asian Mega City

“…The PM 10 concentration levels measured in other cities of Pakistan (inclding Karachi) were also in the range of observation mentioned in the present study. Alam et al (2015) reported PM 10 mean concentration of of 480 µg m -3 in the Peshawar city that is very close to PM 10 concentration in presented study. At Lahore, Pakistan an annual average PM 10 mass concentration of 340 µg m -3 was observed by Schneidemesser et al (2010).…”

“…5. Recently, Alam et al (2015) reported that household combustion emission in Peshawar contained biomass burning, which Shahid et al,Aerosol and Air Quality Research,xxxx 8 contributed 12.8% of the total mass of PM 10 . Secondary aerosol formation in rural areas of Lahore and Karachi could be largely from coal and biomass combustion (Lodhi et al, 2009;Mansha et al, 2012).…”

On the Morphology and Composition of Particulate Matter in an Urban Environment

“…It is 359 m above sea level and covers an area of 1,257 km 2 . The population of the city is about four million and increasing continuously owing to migration of people in search of jobs and education (Alam et al , 2015). The rapid urbanization has promoted more vehicular traffic due to a larger number of motor vehicles used for public and private transportation.…”

Effect of Uncertainty on Source Contributions from the Positive Matrix Factorization Model for a Source Apportionment Study

“…PMF has been frequently applied throughout the world to quantify the contributions of individual sources to PM (Lee et al, 1999;Tian et al, 2013a;Huang et al, 2014;Alam et al, 2015), and its results have significant implications in policies related PM control and scientific investigations on PM and their impacts on public health (Zheng et al, 2005;Chen et al, 2012;Shen et al, 2012;Holzkamper et al, 2015;Lin et al, 2015;Panicker et al, 2015).…”