Source apportionment of ultrafine particles in urban Europe

There is a body of evidence that ultrafine particles (UFP, those with diameters ≤ 100 nm) might have significant impacts on health. Accordingly, identifying sources of UFP is essential to develop abatement policies. This study focuses on urban Europe, and aims at identifying sources and quantifying their contributions to particle number size distribution (PNSD) using receptor modelling (Positive Matrix Factorization, PMF), and evaluating long-term trends of these source contributions using the non-parametric Theil-Sen’s method. Datasets evaluated include 14 urban background (UB), 5 traffic (TR), 4 suburban background (SUB), and 1 regional background (RB) sites, covering 18 European and 1 USA cities, over the period, when available, from 2009 to 2019. Ten factors were identified (4 road traffic factors, photonucleation, urban background, domestic heating, 2 regional factors and long-distance transport), with road traffic being the primary contributor at all UB and TR sites (56–95 %), and photonucleation being also significant in many cities. The trends analyses showed a notable decrease in traffic-related UFP ambient concentrations, with statistically significant decreasing trends for the total traffic-related factors of −5.40 and −2.15 % yr−1 for the TR and UB sites, respectively. This abatement is most probably due to the implementation of European emissions standards, particularly after the introduction of diesel particle filters (DPFs) in 2011. However, DPFs do not retain nucleated particles generated during the dilution of diesel exhaust semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs). Trends in photonucleation were more diverse, influenced by a reduction in the condensation sink potential facilitating new particle formation (NPF) or by a decrease in the emissions of UFP precursors. The decrease of primary PM emissions and precursors of UFP also contributed to the reduction of urban and regional background sources.