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Residential Wood Burning: A Major Source of Fine Particulate Matter in Alpine Valleys in Central Europe

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Urban Air Quality in Europe

Part of the book series: The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry ((HEC,volume 26))

Abstract

Residential wood burning is one of the important sources of ambient particulate matter (PM) in many European regions. Besides total PM, residential wood burning is at many locations an important source of other air pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), benzene, particulate organic carbon (OC), and black carbon (BC), especially in regions such as the Alpine region, where wood fuel is, on one hand, traditionally used for domestic heating during the cold season in small stoves and, on the other hand, meteorological conditions during winter are often favourable for accumulation of wood smoke in a shallow boundary layer. As a consequence, wood burning in the Alpine region can be the dominating source of PM, OC, and BC during the cold season. This is true for both larger cities and small villages in rural areas. The absolute contribution of wood burning emissions to particulate air pollutants tends in rural environments to be even larger than in urban areas. This chapter gives an overview about the results of studies on ambient particulate pollutants from residential wood burning in the Alpine region.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Grisa Močnik from Aerosol d.o.o. (Slovenia) for providing currently unpublished results from sites in Slovenia that perfectly fit into this overview. Thanks are also due to Christine Piot, Jean-Luc Besombes (both Université de Savoie, Le Bourget-du-Lac, France) and Jean-Luc Jaffrezo (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France) for helpful discussions about the influence of wood burning on particulate air pollutants at French Alpine sites. Support from the Competence Center Environment and Sustainability of the ETH Domain (CCES) through the research project IMBALANCE is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Laboratory for Air Pollution and Environmental Technology, EMPA, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, 8600 Duebendorf, Ueberlandstrasse, Switzerland

    Hanna Herich & Christoph Hueglin

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  1. Hanna Herich
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  1. Institute for Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDÆA-CSIC), Spanish Research Council – CSIC, Barcelona, Spain

    Mar Viana

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Herich, H., Hueglin, C. (2013). Residential Wood Burning: A Major Source of Fine Particulate Matter in Alpine Valleys in Central Europe. In: Viana, M. (eds) Urban Air Quality in Europe. The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, vol 26. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/698_2013_229

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