Sources of PM2.5 impacting on gran canaria, spain

Abstract

This paper reports on sequential aerosol sample sets collected at the Campus de Tafira, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), in 2010. Gran Canaria is located approximately 250 km off the coast of North Africa and at the northern margin of the dominant Saharan dust plumes being blown westward across the Atlantic Ocean. PM2.5 aerosol samples were collected on 47 mm filter substrates of Teflon®, quartz fiber and Nuclepore®, generally at weekly sampling intervals. Subsets of these were analyzed for their mass, as well as elemental and ionic compositions. The 2010 annual geometric mean PM2.5 concentration at Tafira was 6.2 μg/m3, with only two particularly dusty events. From a simultaneous PM10 study at the same site, a PM2.5/PM10 mass ratio of 0.35 was calculated...