Frequent occurrence of both anthropogenic pollution and natural dust in East Asian imposes great impact on regional air quality, human health and climate. Till now, their interaction and consequent effect on the dust morphology remain statistically unclear because even though traditional filter-based bulk sampling method can provide accurate chemical compounds, it cannot distinguish the mixing state of chemicals with dust particles.
Frequent occurrence of both anthropogenic pollution and natural dust in East Asian imposes great impact on regional air quality, human health and climate. Till now, their interaction and consequent effect on the dust morphology remain statistically unclear because even though traditional filter-based bulk sampling method can provide accurate chemical compounds, it cannot distinguish the mixing state of chemicals with dust particles.
“Single-particles inspection using electro-microscopy can identify coated/contaminated dust particles,” says Dr. PAN Xiaole from Institute of Atmospheric Physics, “but real-time measurement on the morphological variation of dust particles was difficult due to labor-intensively manual operations.” In a recently published paper in Scientific Reports, PAN and his collaborators from China and Japan investigate polarization of oscillation direction of back-scattering signal of single dust particles online on the basis of a newly developed, bench-top optical particle counter.
Continue reading at: Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Image: Comparison of dust event and pollution. Photos were taken by the camera installed on top of 325-m IAP observation tower. The photo on the left was taken at 15:00, April 17, 2017. Mean PM2.5: 125 μg/m3, PM10: 341 μg/m3. The photo on the right was taken on 11:00 April 18, 2017. PM2.5: 23 μg/m3, PM10: 104 μg/m3 (Image by IAP; data source: https://www.aqistudy.cn/)
