Chemical characterisation of atmospheric aerosols: Application in the context of air pollution and global climatic change

Aerosol science nowadays takes an important place in environmental analysis. This is due to the fact that these particles play an essential role in air pollution, climate change and public health. Despite this, there still exists a lot of uncertainty in this field so that a further chemical and physical characterisation of atmospheric aerosols is needed. The aim of this work was to reduce these uncertainties by means of a number of case studies.;Two of these are dealing with North Sea aerosols. Ca-containing particles, especially CaSO4, were studied for different meteorological conditions. Beside a literature overview of marine and continental sources of these particles, a source identification was carried out for the case of the North Sea atmosphere by means of multivariate techniques. A literature overview was also given for the concentrations of heavy metals (Cd, Cu, Pb, Zn, Ni and Cr) in aerosols above the North Sea. The data were studied and intercompared to look for possible time trends for different regions of the North Sea. Also the sources and the source strength of the emissions are discussed.;Two other case studies focus on atmospheric aerosols, collected in the former Soviet Union. The first describes the combined results of bulk (EDXRF) and individual particle analysis (SEM-EDX) of two sampling campaigns in the high mountain region of Kazakhstan. The aerosol collected there can be considered as background aerosol. The seasonal variation was investigated of the abundance of the different particle types that could be identified by cluster analysis in the SEM-EDX results. Beside this background location and in a analogous way the situation was discussed and systematically compared of different locations with anthropogenic influence in the former Soviet Union. As an aid to the source identification, a literature overview was given of the industrial activities in the different regions of Siberia.;In the framework of the Second Aerosol Characterisation Experiment size segregated samples were collected for single particle analysis by SEM-EDX on the island of Tenerife, in both the marine boundary layer and the free troposphere. A systematical comparison was made between the aerosol characteristics for air masses with a different origin.;Also a new approach is described to apply EPXMA for the estimation of the homogeneity of powder samples of candidate reference materials. It is based on the utilisation of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics. The procedure was applied in the study of the "within-bottle" homogeneity and the "bottle-to-bottle" homogeneity of candidate reference materials.