A Refined Methodology to Adjust Aethalometer Black Carbon Data for Measurement Artifacts

摘要

The Aethalometer data post-processing software developed at Washington University has been revised to include a refined algorithm for adjusting the data for mass loading effects. For well-behaved data such as the example used in this extended abstract, the adjustments are generally consistent with an algorithm that derives adjustment parameters from the concentration change across each tape advance (not shown). The refined algorithm is expected to be superior for noisy data because it uses all the data and thus is more likely to damp the noise. While changes in the mass loading effect can occur on time scales that are shorter than the time over which this algorithm windows the data (and smoothes the adjustment parameter time series), the adjustments do capture changes in the mass loading effect that occur on longer times scales (weeks-to-months) and thus it is an improvement over using the raw data.