Source apportionment of PM in Seoul, South Korea and Beijing, China using dispersion normalized PMF.

East Asian countries experience severe air pollution owing to their rapid development and urbanization induced by substantial economic activities. South Korea and China are among the most polluted East Asian countries with high mass concentrations of PM. Although the occurrence of transboundary air pollution among neighboring countries has been recognized for a long time, studies involving simultaneous ground-based PM monitoring and source apportionment in South Korea and China have not been conducted to date. This study performed simultaneous daily ground-based monitoring of PM in Seoul and Beijing from January to December 2019. The mass concentrations of PM and its major chemical components were analyzed simultaneously during 2019. Positive matrix factorization (PMF) as well as dispersion normalized PMF (DN-PMF) were utilized for the source apportionment of ambient PM at the two sites. 23 h average ventilation coefficients were applied for daily PM chemical constituents' data. Nine sources were identified at both sites. While secondary nitrate, secondary sulfate, mobile, oil combustion, biomass burning, soil, and aged sea salt were commonly found at both sites, industry/coal combustion and incinerator were identified only at Seoul and incinerator/industry and coal combustion were identified only at Beijing. Reduction of the meteorological influences were found in DN-PMF compare to C-PMF but the effects of DN on mobile source were reduced by averaging over the 23 h sampling period. The DN-PMF results showed that Secondary nitrate (Seoul: 25.5%; Beijing: 31.7%) and secondary sulfate (Seoul: 20.5%; Beijing: 17.6%) were most dominant contributors to PM at both sites. Decreasing secondary sulfate contributions and increasing secondary nitrate contributions were observed at both sites.