THE COLLABORATIVE IAEA TC PROJECT ON THE INVESTIGATION OF FINE AND COARSE ATMOSPHERIC PARTICULATE MATTER IN ARASIA REGION

摘要

There is lack of enough data and study dealing with air pollution in Arasia region (Arab countries in Asia). Since atmospheric particulate matter PM10 and PM2.5 are trans-boundary and can effectively contribute to air pollution in certain localized areas, it is proposed to investigate these air pollution factors in a regional context. This work is a part of a study conducted among several Arab countries in West Asia, under an IAEA regional technical cooperation project for Arasia region. In a first phase, some preliminary results were obtained as moderate number of samples was collected from the different participating countries. It concerned the characterization of fine particles (PM2.5), collected on Teflon filters every sixth day for 24-h with an air flow of 2.3 m~3/h, as weight in air volume and elemental composition using only PIXE technique. Some of these first results confirmed the high values of PM2.5 as predicted and showed some similarities in the variability with time of the obtained results when the concerned sampling areas are close, such as Beirut, Amman and Damascus. However, in the subsequent ongoing phases, more samples per country are collected, as continuous sampling is still running since several months at the rate of two days per week. So, this behavior of the PM variability could be better highlighted when compared between the different sampling sites.