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Characteristics of major volatile organic hazardous air pollutants in the urban air of Kaohsiung city

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Abstract

The concentrations and characteristics of volatile organic hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) in the urban city of Kaohsiung from motor vehicles and dense pollutant sources has become a national concern. To continuously monitor volatile organic HAPs, sampling sites were selected near the four air-quality monitoring stations established by Ethe nvironmental Protection Administration of Taiwan ROC, namely Nan-tz, Tso-ying, San-min and Hsiao-kang, from north to south. An on-site automated online monitor of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) was used for continuous monitoring. This study performed two consecutive days of 24-h monitoring of five volatile organic HAPs form August to October 2005 at the four monitoring sites, which cover the northern, central, and southern areas of Kaohsiung city. The average monitored concentration was 2.78–4.84 ppb for benzene, 5.90–9.66 ppb for toluene, 3.62–5.90 ppb for ethylbenzene, 3.73–5.34 ppb for m,p-xylene, 3.38–4.22 ppb for o-xylene, and 4.48–7.00 ppb for styrene. The average monitored concentrations of the major volatile organic HAPs tended to follow the pattern San-min > Nan-tz > Hsiao-kang > Tso-ying. Among all the species monitored in this study, toluene had the highest ambient concentration, followed by styrene, m,p-xylene, ethylbenzene, o-xylene, and benzene. The results showed that the concentration at night was higher than that in the day for toluene at Nan-tz, San-min, Hsiao-kang, and for benzene at Nan-tz and Hsiao-kang.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Environmental Protection Bureau of the Kaohsiung city Government, Taiwan, ROC for financially supporting this research. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and corrections to the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Nanzih, Kaohsiung, 811, Taiwan, ROC

    Mei-Chuan Huang

  2. Department of Safety, Health, and Environmental Engineering, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, No. 2, Jhuoyue Road, Nanzih, Kaohsiung, 811, Taiwan, ROC

    Jim Juimin Lin

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  1. Mei-Chuan Huang
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Correspondence to Jim Juimin Lin.

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Huang, MC., Lin, J.J. Characteristics of major volatile organic hazardous air pollutants in the urban air of Kaohsiung city. Environ Geochem Health 29, 447–455 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-007-9089-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-007-9089-x

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