Clarkson University's Philip K. Hopke recently received the Arthur C. Stern Distinguished Paper Award for a paper he co-authored on air quality.

The paper, "Source Identification of Atlanta Aerosol by Positive Matrix Factorization," describes a quantitative source apportionment for the ambient fine particulate matter concentrations (PM2.5) based on multiple years of data collected in Atlanta, Ga.

These techniques have been widely used by the scientific community to identify and control sources contributing to PM2.5 as part of the planning process for achieving compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

Hopke, the Bayard D. Clarkson Distinguished Professor in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of the Institute for a Sustainable Environment, collaborated with Eugene Kim, who was a post-doctoral associate at Clarkson and is now an air resources engineer at the California Air Resources Board, and Eric Edgerton, co-founder and president of Atmospheric Research and Analysis on the paper.

The award is given annually to authors for their outstanding contribution to the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association in the fields of air and waste management.

"This paper has been widely cited more because of the new methods presented than the source apportionment of the Atlanta ambient aerosol," Hopke said. "We introduced an approach to identify the directions that sources may lie from the sampling site and how to better apportion the aerosol mass within a positive matrix factorization analysis."

Read the paper at www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10473289.2003.10466209%20#.VQclZOHzMsQ .