Paul Scherrer Institute, Laboratory of Atmospheric Chemistry (LAC)
SMASH Associate partner
The Laboratory of Atmospheric Chemistry (LAC) investigates the impact anthropogenic activities have on fundamental processes in the atmosphere, and with that on air quality, human health, and the climate. The LAC consists of six interacting groups that operate cutting-edge facilities and instrumentation in the lab and in the field, and run computer models. The LAC is responsible for the long-term observations of atmospheric aerosol at the research station Jungfraujoch and at the Payerne observatory, and run an atmospheric chamber facility at PSI, all embedded in the Aerosol, Clouds and Trace Gases Research Infrastructure (ACTRIS).
The expertise of the LAC group in aerosol source apportionment is vast since research on source apportionment methods such as Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF), and their application on instrumental (AMS, ACSM, X-ACT, EESI) data has been conducted for decades. Moreover, this group is currently pioneering the introduction of data science methodologies in air pollution source apportionment for real-world, chamber, and synthetic data, as for instance, with the development of the Bayesian Auto-correlated Matrix Factorization (BAMF) (Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione grant PZPGP2_201992). These research lines are strongly aligned with the SMASH objectives, hence the LAC group is a key contributor to the project providing significant expertise and resources on this topic.