Laboratory evaluation of a new aerobiological sampler for use in the Antarctic

In order to operate successfully and reliably in inhospitable polar climates, an aerobiological sampler requires a number of characteristics. It must sample a large volume of air, sample extremes of temperature and in high winds and cope with an accumulation of snow and rime ice. A sampler, built to overcome these problems, is described in this paper and was evaluated in wind tunnel tests which investigated the effect of wind speed and particle size on performance in comparison with rotorod samplers. The new sampler was more efficient than rotord samplers for sampling 5 μm particles at low wind speeds (2 m s−1) but results for the two samplers were similar for 30 μm particles and at 4 m s−1.