Carbon oxidation state as a metric for describing the chemistry of atmospheric organic aerosol.

By J. Kroll, N. Donahue, J. Jimenez, S. Kessler, M. Canagaratna, K. Wilson, K. Altieri, L. Mazzoleni, A. Wozniak, Hendrik Bluhm and 4 more. Nature Chemistry, 2011

1,041 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A detailed understanding of the sources, transformations and fates of organic species in the environment is crucial because of the central roles that they play in human health, biogeochemical cycles and the Earth's climate. However, such an understanding is hindered by the immense chemical complexity of environmental mixtures of organics; for example, atmospheric organic aerosol consists of at least thousands of individual compounds, all of which likely evolve chemically over their atmospheric lifetimes. Here, we demonstrate the utility of describing organic aerosol (and other complex organic mixtures) in terms of average carbon oxidation state, a quantity that always increases with oxidation, and is readily measured using state-of-the-art analytical techniques. Field and laboratory measurements of the average carbon oxidation state, using several such techniques, constrain the chemical properties of the organics and demonstrate that the formation and evolution of organic aerosol involves simultaneous changes to both carbon oxidation state and carbon number.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/776c434be0e86832e934250c216fb2cdab6a992d

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In Atmospheric Science

1. M. Canagaratna
2. D. Worsnop
3. Philip K. Hopke

In Environmental Engineering

1. G. Norris
2. P. Paatero
3. S. Eberly

Citations in the corpus

• Methods for estimating uncertainty in PMF solutions: examples with ambient air and water quality data and guidance on reporting PMF results. (2015, background): “Factors range in both volatility and degree of oxidation (Donahue et al., 2012; Jimenez et al., 2009; Kroll et al., 2011): low-volatility oxygenated organic aerosol (LV-OOA), semivolatile oxygenated organic aerosol (SV-OOA), hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol (HOA), and biomass burning organic…”
• Understanding atmospheric organic aerosols via factor analysis of aerosol mass spectrometry: a review (2011, background): “, AMS built with a high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometer, is further able to determine the elemental composition and oxidation states of organic aerosols [31–33].”