Articles | Volume 16, issue 8
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-5453-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-5453-2016
Research article
 | 
02 May 2016
Research article |  | 02 May 2016

Determination of primary combustion source organic carbon-to-elemental carbon (OC / EC) ratio using ambient OC and EC measurements: secondary OC-EC correlation minimization method

Cheng Wu and Jian Zhen Yu

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Cited articles

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Elemental carbon (EC) has been widely used as a tracer to estimate secondary organic carbon (SOC) from ambient EC and OC data. Key to the EC tracer method is to determine a proper primary OC / EC ratio at the observation site. We examine here a method that derives this ratio by seeking the minimum correlation between SOC and EC. This method has a clear quantitative criterion for the ratio derivation and is demonstrated to have superior accuracy over the commonly used approaches for SOC estimation.
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