ИСТИНА

Aerosols generated by incomplete combustion of fossil fuel (FF) and biomass burning (BB) are major air pollutants. Siberian wildfires are crucial for understanding environmental and climate impacts as the biggest source of biomass burning in subarctic areas. Southeast Asia has one of the most intensive seasons of biomass burning emissions over the world. Transport systems are currently acknowledged to be a largest source of uncertainties in understanding the aerosol impacts on regional air quality. Ship emission is among the world’s highest pollutant per quality of fuel consumed. Especially, biomass burning may affect profoundly the air quality and public health in megacity urban area, indicating smoke aerosol as tracer of harmful pollutant (Popovicheva et al., 2014). Combustion aerosols may serve tracers allowing a link to distinct combustion sources in apportionment studies if their key physico-chemical characteristics representative the emission sources are defined. The estimations of the source contribution to ambient particulates assume specific markers different from other combustion sources. A complexity of multicomponent and source-specific PM emissions requires the characterization of individual particles. This paper reviews the quantification of particulate combustion emission microstructure and identification of characteristic morphological and chemical micromarkers of source-specific combustion aerosols emitted by transport systems (road and marine diesel engines), by Siberian biomass burning in small-scale experiments in a Large aerosol chamber, and by agriculture fires during dry season in Vietnam. Cluster analysis of group abundance shows carbonaceous particles (soot and organic) and inorganic fly ash in smoke microstructure. Quantification of particle types in terms of physicochemical relevance supports the identification of groups which may act as biomicromarkers discriminating between diesel and biofuel exhaust, as micromarkers of specific combustion phase (open flaming vs smoldering). The mixture of carbonaceous particles (soot and tar) and dust revealed multicomponent structure of Moscow smoke aerosols during extreme wildfire event of August 2010, pointing the difference with non-smoke ambient aerosols and micromarkers for regional biomass burning in urban environment (Popovicheva et al., 2014).