SF Bay Area Study of Residential Wood Smoke Plumes and Particulate PAH Compared With Cigarette PPAH

http://BurningIssues.org
For a period of more than 10 years from 1994 to the present, Dr. Wayne Ott of the Statistics Department, Stanford University measured indoor and outdoor particulate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PPAH) levels in his residential neighborhood in Redwood City, CA.

The first web page describes PPAH by time of day over many months. These time series show all neighborhood PPAH activity, indoors and outdoors. During wood burning months the PPAH are seen to be at their daily highest in the evening, peaking just before midnight, and on weekends and holidays, culminating at the highest levels with Christmas.
http://burningissues.org/car-www/science/Ott-12-year-study.html

Similar wood smoke PM2.5 exposure results were seen in the Bay Area using a nephelometer in 1992-93 by M. Rozenberg (see NeighborhoodMonitoringbi.pdf.) The pioneering work in this method was done by Dr. Tim Larson, U. of Washington.

The second page compares PPAH on Christmas Eve and Day from 1994 and 2006. For reference it includes a chart of PPAH from 5 cigarettes smoked indoors at a non-wood burning time of year. Discussion: Dec. 24-25 levels of PPAH showed no improvement over that time period. In 2006 some subsequent days showed improvement. Logs show that those days were windy, rainy, or both. The second page is summarized in the attached PDF (OttXmasChart.pdf).

These findings are from a study of fine particulate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PPAHs) measured at 7 homes in the San Francisco Bay Area by Stanford University researcher Wayne R. Ott . The research was sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the measurements were made with state-of-the art continuous air monitoring instruments that use ultraviolet light to irradiate the particles, which then are measured by their electric charge. This measurement principle is called photoionization.

Portions of the study describing the state-of-the-art measurement method are discussed in a published paper by W. R. Ott and H. C. Siegmann, “Using Multiple Continuous Fine Particle Monitors to Characterize Tobacco, Incense, Candle, Cooking, Wood Burning, and Vehicular Sources in Indoor, Outdoor, and In-Transit Settings,” Atmospheric Environment, Vol. 40, 2006, pp. 821-843.

Credit to Dr. Neil Klepeis and Dr. Donald Rozenberg for the charts and to Vada Lee Jones and Mary J. Rozenberg for text editing.