Ion beam techniques for source fingerprinting fine particle air pollution in major Asian-Pacific cities.

Fine particle air pollution is a significant problem in large urbanised areas across the Asian region. With funding from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) fifteen countries in Asia have been collecting weekly samples on filters of fine and coarse particles in major cities for the past 15 years. These filters have been analysed for over 20 different chemical species from hydrogen to lead using a range of analytical techniques including accelerator based ion beam techniques such as PIXE, PIGE, PESA, RBS, as well as XRF and NAA. These data have been included into a major database, which is generally available, containing over 17,000 combined sampling days from these fifteen countries spanning an area of the globe from ± 50° latitude and from 70° to 180° longitude. That is, the sampling covers an area north-south from Mongolia to New Zealand and west-east from Islamabad, Pakistan to Wellington, NZ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]