Source apportionment of visibility‐degrading aerosols in the lower fraser valley, B.C.

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Abstract
The Lower Fraser Valley of British Columbia (LFV) is currently experiencing rapid population growth and is perceived to suffer from reduced air quality, specifically, elevated ozone concentrations and impaired visibility. It is necessary to identify the sources of visibility‐degrading aerosols in order to develop strategies to prevent further degradation and to institute measures to improve air quality in this region. Although chemical mass balance analyses have typically been used in such studies, herein, a P‐mode principal component analysis (PCA) is performed upon the ambient aerosol species at one polluted site in the LFV, and source profiles are inferred from the resulting component loadings. The loading coefficients on the five significant components (which account for over 70% of the variance in the fine aerosol speciation dataset) are used to assess the contribution of these sources to paniculate light scattering (bsp) Automobile emissions and wood burning are found to contribute most to bsp at this site.