SEASONAL VARIATION IN INDOOR AND OUTDOOR CONCENTRATIONS OF VOCS IN NEW YORK CITY

摘要

The TEACH project (Toxics Exposure Assessment-A Columbia-Harvard Project) recruited high-school students to participate in an exposure assessment study which included personal, indoor, and outdoor sampling of multiple pollutants. This paper presents the results from the indoor and outdoor sampling of various volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the winter and summer of 1999. Thirty-three of the homes were sampled in both seasons Air-exchange was also measured in all apartments in both seasons. The VOCs with the highest concentrations outdoors and indoors, both in the winter and summer, were MTBE and Toluene. Consistent with the literature, indoor concentrations of VOCs were higher than outdoor concentrations sometimes by a factor of more than 10. Seasonal differences were observed for indoor-outdoor ratios of the target VOCs, with winter ratios often exceeding summer ratios. Effects of air exchange rate were seen for VOCs with the highest indoor-outdoor.