Jotulf3cb said:
Can someone please point me in the right direction. I'm looking for FACTUAL/REAL data of a comparison between car emissions and wood emissions. I'm sure there is reputable data available .... I've tried searching and cannot find anything concrete however am sure that one of you guys can help me out. Thanks in advance and happy burning!
There are basically two types of approaches to the study of atmospheric pollutant emission sources (including car exhaust and wood combustion sources, as well as a dozen or so other common source types) for a given air basin, namely "source modeling" and "receptor modeling".
In source modeling one tries to determine what major emission sources exist at particular locations within the study area, what the nature and quantity of the atmospheric pollutants emitted by these sources is and how they are likely to be transported and transformed in the environment in order to predict what kind of pollutants can be expected to occur at a given point of interest and roughly at what concentrations.
In other words, in source modeling one already knows the pollution sources and the pollutants emitted and now one wants to calculate their abundance, let's say at the location of a newly planned hospital or school complex. Consequently, source modeling is a form of foreward modeling. Detailed organic source profiles for a wide range of emission sources, including wood and cars, have been determined by Rogge and Mazurek et al. whereas inorganic source profiles have been published by Hopke et al. (just Google these names in combination with terms such as "emission sources" to find their publications on the web);
In receptor modeling one systematically collects and analyzes ambient air samples from one or more locations within a given air basin and then one tries to determine which types of emission sources are represented in the sample, what their relative contributions are and where the most important emission sources are likely to be located. In short, receptor modeling is a form of backward modeling. Detailed reports covering the organic and inorganic emission contributions of cars and wood have been published by Watson and Chow, whereas Hopke et al have focussed primarily on inorganic emissions.
Ideally, a researcher wanting to determine the type of air pollutant emissions playing a role in a given air basin, as well as their origin and distribution in space and time, carries out both source modeling and receptor modeling in order to let the outcomes of the two approaches validate each other. In practice, systematic source modeling is often difficult because permission from the operators of the various emission sources to take representative samples tends to be hard or impossible to obtain. Consequently, receptor modeling constitutes by far the lion-share of the studies published in recent years.
Henk