A High Altitude Himalayan Station in Eastern India
Aerosol and Air Quality Research, 15: 465–478, 2015 Copyright © Taiwan Association for Aerosol Research ISSN: 1680-8584 print / 2071-1409 online doi: 10.4209/aaqr.2014.02.0028 Characterization of Black Carbon Aerosols over Darjeeling - A High Altitude Himalayan Station in Eastern India Chirantan Sarkar1, Abhijit Chatterjee1,2,3*, Ajay Kumar Singh2, Sanjay Kumar Ghosh2,3, Sibaji Raha1,2,3 1 Environmental Sciences Section, Bose Institute, P 1/12 CIT Scheme-VIIM, Kolkata 700 054, India 2 Center for Astroparticle Physics and Space Science, Bose Institute, Saltlake, Sector-V, Kolkata 700 091, India 3 National Facility on Astroparticle Physics and Space Science, Bose Institute, 16, AJC Bose Road, Darjeeling 734 101, India ABSTRACT A continuous monitoring of black carbon (BC) aerosols was carried over a high altitude station Darjeeling (27°01′N, 88°15′E; 2200 m a.s.l.) at eastern part of Himalaya in India during January 2010–December 2011. In this article, we have presented the results of our analysis of the data collected during this interval. This study is focused on the investigation of the temporal variations, potential sources, long-range transport of BC aerosols along with the meteorological impact on these aerosols. BC is found to exhibit strong seasonal variation with the maximum concentration during premonsoon (5.0 ± 1.1 µg/m3) followed by winter (3.9 ± 2.2 µg/m3), postmonsoon (2.9 ± 1.0 µg/m3) and minimum during monsoon (1.7 ± 0.7 µg/m3). BC concentration varied between 0.2–12.8 µg/m3 with an average of 3.4 ± 1.9 µg/m3 over the entire period of study.
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