Estimations of primary and secondary organic carbon formation in PM2.5 aerosols of Santiago City, Chile

High concentration of fine airborne particulates is considered one of the major environmental pollutants in Santiago, the Chilean Capital city, which in 1997 was declared a PM10 saturated zone. To date there is no control of the amounts of fine and coarse aerosols concentrations and the source and chemical characterizations of the PM2.5 particulates in the carbonaceous fractions are not well known even though this fraction could be represented almost the 50% in mass of the PM2.5. In this work, we present for the first time determinations of primary organic aerosol (POA) and secondary organic aerosol composition (SOA) fractions of the total mass of PM2.5 particulates collected in the urban atmosphere of Santiago City. Our purpose is to know the anthropogenic contributions to the formation of SOA. To accomplish this we used the elemental carbon (EC) and organic carbon (OC) determinations developed by automatic monitoring stations installed in the city during the period 2002-2005, with a particular analysis of the summer time occurred in February 2004. Based on the EC tracer method, we have estimated the POA and SOA fraction and our data permit us to estimate the SOA reaching up to 20% of total organic aerosol matter, in good agreement to other measurements observed in large cities of Europe and U.S.A. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.