Temporal/seasonal variations of size-dependent airborne fungi indoor/outdoor relationships for a wind-induced naturally ventilated airspace

With the use of published temporal/seasonal size characteristics of fungal spores and meteorological data in the subtropical climate, we estimated the airborne fungal concentration indoor/outdoor (I/O) ratios in a wind-induced naturally ventilated home. We expanded previous size-dependent indoor air quality model based on a hygroscopic growth factor as a function of relative humidity (RH) on aerodynamic diameter and concentration of fungal spores. The average geometric mean diameters of airborne fungi decreased from outdoor 2.58±0.37 to indoor 1.91±0.12 μm in summer, whereas decreased from outdoor 2.79±0.32 to indoor 1.73±0.10 μm in winter, resulting from the effect of hygroscopicity of airborne fungi. The higher indoor airborne fungal concentrations occurred in early and late afternoon in which median values were 699.29 and 626.20 CFU m−3 in summer as well as 138.71 and 99.01 CFU m−3 in winter, respectively, at 2 a.m. and 8 p.m. In the absence of indoor sources, summer has higher mean I/O ratios of airborne fungal concentration (0.29 – 0.58) than that in winter (0.12 – 0.16). Parsimoniously, our proposed RH-corrected I/O ratio model could be used to estimate the indoor source concentrations of bioaerosols provided that the actual measured fungus-specific I/O ratios are available.