Measurements of Air Concentrations of SO2, NO2 and NH3 at Rural and Remote Sites in Asia

Sensitive diffusive samplers for concentration measurements in ambient airhave been used successfully in Sweden for several years. The samplers have theadvantage of being stable at room temperature before, as well as after,sampling, easy to handle, and cost-efficient. Furthermore, they do not requireelectricity or field calibration. In order to test their use in tropical andsubtropical environments and to obtain a preliminary set of data to validateatmospheric chemistry transport models in this part of the world, duplicatesamples were collected at 11 sites every second month during one year. Eightof the sites were background sites in Asia. It was not possible within theproject to compare the measured concentrations with other measurementtechniques. However, the reproducibility of the duplicates was satisfactoryover the whole measuring range (almost three orders of magnitude of theconcentration for SO₂) and reasonable agreement with modelcalculations was obtained at least for SO₂ andNH₃. Further testing of the measuring technique in tropicalareas is, however, warranted.