ACMCC (Aerosol Chemical Monitor Calibration Center) : Results from the 2016 ACTRIS intercomparison exercises
Résumé
The Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor (ACSM, Aerodyne Res. Inc.) has been installed in a growing number of supersites around the world for long-term monitoring of the submicron aerosol chemical composition. In Europe, most of these ACSM measurements are part of the European research infrastructure for aerosol, clouds, and trace gases (ACTRIS, http://www.actris.eu). Coordinated efforts to ensure that measurement are comparable from one site to another, and that all instruments follow recommended standard operating procedures are essential for the data quality of these networks. Within ACTRIS, selected expertise centers offer training and calibration of the instruments used in the network. The Aerosol Chemical Monitor Calibration Centre (ACMCC) is dedicated to online aerosol chemical monitors, with a first ACSM intercomparison/calibration campaign performed in 2013 (Crenn et al, 2014; Frohlich et al., 2014). In 2016, a second large ACTRIS campaign involved 15 quadrupole ACSMs and 6 of the newer ToF-ACSM devices. In this work, we present the results obtained from this 2016 intercomparison, focusing on new calibration procedures and on the influence of artefacts recently identified for aerosol mass spectrometer measurements (Pieber et al., 2016). These new procedures result in a significant improvement in the agreement between the Quad-ACSM instruments (Fig. 1). Results obtained by the 6 ToF-ACSM devices also allow for the first time extensive comparison of these instruments (Fig. 2), showing consistency between them as well as with data measured from the conventional quadrupole ACSM.