Measurement report: characterization and sources of the ambient secondary organic carbon in a Chinese megacity over five years from 2016 to 2020.

To investigate impact factors and source area of secondary organic aerosols in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region, a world-class urban agglomeration in China, long-term measurements of organic carbon (OC) and elementary carbon (EC) in particulate matter of less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) with hourly time resolution were conducted at a regional site in Shanghai from 2016 to 2020. Based on the five-year measurements, the interannual, monthly, seasonal, and diurnal variations in OC and EC, as well as OC subtypes, i.e., secondary OC (SOC) and primary OC (POC), apportioned by the novel statistical model of the minimum R² method, and the formation pathways of SOC, are presented. By examining the relationship between SOC and temperature, as well as relative humidity (RH), we show that SOC formation is greatly enhanced at high temperatures (>30 °C), while it is inversely correlated with RH. In particular, we show that the photochemical formation of SOC is the major formation pathway even in winter when solar radiation was supposedly less intense than in summer, which is different from that in north China plain where aqueous phase chemistry is found to be an important SOC formation pathway. Moreover, increased SOC concentrations are also found to be associated with high wind speed (>5 m s^-1) in winter, which is increased by 29.1% (2.62 µg m^-3) when compared to that during lower winds, suggesting regional sources of SOC in winter. By analyzing the potential source regions using the concentration weighted trajectory (CWT), the geographic regions of SOC are found to be mainly associated with transport from outside Shanghai (SOC > 3.5 µg m^-3) including central and southern Anhui, Zhejiang, and Fujian. The results from this study provide critical information about the long-term trend of carbonaceous aerosol, in particular SOC, in one of the largest megacities in the world and are helpful to develop pollution control measures from a long-term planning perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]