Mixing characteristics of black carbon aerosols in a coastal city using the CPMA-SP2 system

The mixing state of black carbon aerosols (BC) has the largest uncertainty for climate forcing evaluation. In this study, a tandem observation, combining a centrifugal particle mass analyzer (CPMA) and a single particle soot photometer (SP2), was conducted to investigate the mixing state of BC in a coastal city in eastern China. First, particles with specific masses (1.0 fg, 2.1 fg, 4.5 fg, 9.7 fg, and 20.1 fg) were selected using CPMA and consecutively measured by SP2 to determine the corresponding BC mass (M-BC) of the particle. The mass ratio (M-R) of the coating matter to the BC core was used to indicate the coating thickness and aging degree of BC. The results showed that the M-R value obtained from the CPMA-SP2 system was well correlated with the mixing state condition derived from the traditional lag-time method. However, the lag-time method tends to misclassify thickly to thinly coated BC as particles with larger masses. The M-R generally increased as the mass of BC-containing particles increased. M-R showed a clear diurnal pattern with a minimum at 8:00 and a maximum at 13:00 due to photochemical process during the daytime. The larger BC-containing particles had a much weaker diurnal pattern because other secondary processes may contribute more to the coatings for large BC-containing particles. The M-R maintained a high value when the air mass was stagnant in the local area with high pollutant concentrations and high relative humidity (RH), while the M-R was at its lowest value when the air mass was derived from the marine area with high RH and low pollutant concentrations. These observations suggest that the increase in M-R is the result of the combined effect of high RH and high pollutant concentrations.