Determining the sources of atmospheric particles in Shanghai, China, from magnetic and geochemical properties

The study describes an investigation into the sources of atmospheric particles collected at 11 sites across Shanghai, China, during one week in November 1998. Source ascription is based on mineral magnetic and geochemical properties, and a chemical mass balance (CMB) model. The CMB model shows that the main contributions to total suspended particles (TSPs) are products of coal combustion, with lesser contributions from construction sites, vehicle emissions, windblown soil and steel-making furnaces. The spatial variability of concentration-dependent magnetic parameters and heavy metal concentrations support the findings from the CMB model. In general, the variability of magnetic quotient parameters is lower than for concentration parameters. This suggests that there are relatively constant proportions of low coercivity ‘magnetite’ and high coercivity ‘haematite’ mineral phases in dust samples at all sites, with a dominance of superparamagnetic (SP) and multidomain (MD)+pseudo-single domain (PSD) ‘magnetite’ grains. MD+PSD grains are produced to a large extent by fossil-fuel combustion emissions, particularly from the main iron and steel manufacturing and power generation industrial complex. Linear multiple regression analyses show that some non-destructive and rapid magnetic measurements may be used to estimate the concentrations of common heavy metals in TSPs.