Elements in atmosphere

It is remarkable that, except for local hot-spots such as around industrial sites, mining areas and volcanoes, the elemental compositions of atmospheric dust in similar locations, such as remote or rural or urban are relatively constant over the world. This suggests either common sources, or a dominant source, or good mixing and transport of the dust around the globe. In fact all three factors have a role in determining the uniformity. Because of the consistent composition it is possible to estimate the median concentrations of the elements in atmospheric dusts in similar, but widely separated, locations. These estimates are given in columns 2 to 7 in Table n. The concentrations of the elements in the atmospheric dust are expressed as mass per volume of air. For remote locations (columns 2 to 5) the concentrations are in ng m 3, whereas for rural and urban areas (columns 6 and 7) the elemental concentrations are in xg m-3. 

Diverse techniques have been employed to identify the sources of elements in atmospheric dust (and surface dust) (Table V). Some involve considering trends in concentration and others use various statistical methods. The degree of sophistication and detail obtained from the analyses increases from top left to bottom right of the Table. The sources identified as contributing the elements in rural and urban atmospheric dusts are detailed in Table VI. The principal sources are crustal material, soil, coal and oil combustion emissions, incinerated refuse emissions, motor vehicle emissions, marine spray, cement and concrete weathering, mining and metal working emissions. Many elements occur in more than one source, and they are classified in the... 

Concentrations of trace elements in atmospheric samples at prevailing wind directions... 

The SVD of the table of concentrations of trace elements in atmospheric samples yields (in accordance with Section 17.6) ... 

Preprocessing is the operation which precedes the extraction of latent vectors from the data. It is an operation which is carried out on all the elements of an original data table X and which produces a transformed data table Z. We will discuss six common methods of preprocessing, including the trivial case in which the original data are left unchanged. The effects of each of these six types of preprocessing will be illustrated numerically by means of the small 4x3 data table from the study of trace elements in atmospheric samples which has been used in previous sections (Table 31.1). The various effects of the transformations can be observed from the two summary statistics (mean and norm). These statistics include the vector of column-means m and the vector of column-norms of the transformed data table Z ... 

Table 11.11 summarizes the major methods used to measure the inorganic elements in atmospheric particulate matter. 

TABLE 11.11 Some Common Methods Used to Measure Inorganic Elements in Atmospheric Particles... 

Bogen, J., Trace Elements in Atmospheric Aerosol in the Heidelberg Area,... 

Bogen J. 1973. Trace elements in atmospheric aerosol in the Heidelberg area, measured by instrumental neutron activation analysis. Atmos Environ 7 1117-1125. 

Schmeling, M. (2003). Seasonal variations in diurnal concentrations of trace elements in atmospheric aerosols in Chicago. Anal. Chim. Acta 496, 315-323. 

The major element content and mineralogy of air-borne particles reflect closely those of continental soils and shales, although atmospheric particulates also include materials of oceanic origin (Delaney et al., 1967), and show considerable enrichments in some trace metals (Buat-Menard and Chesselet, 1979). The average composition of shales and soils (Table 9.8) was chosen to represent the properties of dust transported from the continents to the ocean. Fluxes of elements in atmospheric transport to the ocean are given in Table 9.14. 

Berg T., Royset O., and Steinnes E. (1994) Trace element in atmospheric precipitation at Norvegian background stations (1989-1990) measured by ICP-MS. Atmos. Environ. 28, 3519-3536. 

The name comes from the Greek xenon, meaning stranger. Xenon was discovered by William Ramsay (1852-1916) and Morris W. Travers (1872-1961) in 1898 as part of their search for a noble gas between helium and argon. It is present as a trace element in atmospheric air. It is the heaviest of the noble gases. It is used commercially in specialty lamps and lasers, as well as in sophisticated laboratory equipment such as bubble chambers and as a radioactive isotope used as a tracer. 

Buat-Menard, P., J. Morelli, and R. Chesselet (1974). Water-soluble elements in atmospheric particulate matter over tropical and equatorial Atlantic. J. Rech. Atmos. 8, 661-673. 

For the bulk analysis of metallic elements in atmospheric particles, spectroscopic methods (e.g., AAS, ICP-OES, IPC-MS, XRF, PIXE, SSMS) are widely used (Part V, Chapter 2). Here, sample preparation is a crucial... 

Smodis B (2003) IAEA approaches to assessment of chemical elements in atmosphere. In Markert BA, Breure AM and Zechmeister H, eds. Bioindicators and Biomonitors, pp. 875 -902. Elsevier, Amsterdam. 

Kasahara M, Takahashi K, Sakisaka M, Tomita M (1993) Standard samples and calibration of PIXE analysis. Nucl Instrum Methods Phys Res B 75 136-139 Kasahara M, Ogiwara H, Yamamoto K (1996a) Soluble and insoluble components of air pollutants scavenged by rain water. Nucl Instrum Methods Phys Res B 118 400-402 Kasahara M, Park JH, Chatani S (1996b) Size distribution and solubility of 15 elements in atmospheric aerosols. Int J PIXE 6 299-310... 

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