Development of an Autonomous Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor with Integrated Calibration and Quality Assurance Capability

Description

In recent years, the Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor (ACSM) has become an important tool for understanding atmospheric chemistry by providing long term measurements of ambient aerosol chemical composition. While the goal of the ACSM is an instrument that can run for extended periods of time without significant user intervention, it still requires calibration with expensive and complicated instrumentation as well as significant post processing to provide reliable data. In order to make the ACSM more suitable for deployment in long-term monitoring stations where calibrations are performed by site technicians and where it is necessary to supply accurate, quality assured data in near real time, we are developing a simple, relatively inexpensive calibration techniques for the ACSM and improved the software capabilities for real-time analysis of ACSM data. Here we present the results from the ongoing development of the hardware and methodology for this calibration system as well as software improvements for improved real-time data.