The term aerosol commonly refers to the particulate/air mixture, as opposed to the particulate matter alone. They have impacts on climate and precipitation and adversely affect human health. Sources of particulate matter can be anthropogenic or natural:

- The particulate-air anthropogenic pollutants mainly originate from the combustion of carbonaceous fuels. A unique primary tracer for combustion emissions is black carbon (BC) since there exists no non-combustion sources of BC.

- The natural particulate matter mainly originates from two sources: desert dust and volcanic ash where deserts are major sources of aerosol injected into the atmosphere, with mineral dust comprising more than 35% of the emitted primary aerosol mass.

The main goal of the DNAAP project (Detection of Non-Anthropogenic Air Pollution) is to develop the measurement setup and application to distinguish optical properties of BC and mineral dust. BC is strongly absorbing light across entire visual, near infra-red and near ultra-violet spectral range. On the other hand, mineral dust is relatively transparent at solar wavelengths, which resulting in light scattering and relatively weak light absorption comparing to BC. To measure the light absorption on mineral dust, the mineral dust contribution has to be concentrated in the sample which is done by high volume Virtual Impactor (VI).  

Product configuration includes two AE33 with different size selective inlets: VI inlet for sampling coarse mode of aerosols (mineral dust) and PM1 inlet for sampling fine mode of aerosols (BC).  

The light absorption on mineral dust is then determined by following equation (Drinovec et al., 2020): $$b_{abs,\,mineral\,dust} = \frac{b_{abs,\,VI} \, - \, b_{abs, \, PM1}}{EF},$$ where EF is enhancement factor of VI setup. The concentration of mineral dust is then calculated as: $$Mineral \,Dust=\frac{b_{abs,\,mineral\,dust,\,370nm}}{MAC},$$ where MAC is mass absorption cross section for dust. MAC could be site specific and source region specific.

Additionally, BC portion of aerosol concentration, measured on AE33 with PM1 inlet, can be further speciate into Fossil Fuel (FF) and Biomass Burning (BB) contributions by Aethalometer model (Sandradewi et al., 2008).
 

The details about DNAAP metodology and validation could be found in paper:

Drinovec, L., Sciare, J., Stavroulas, I., Bezantakos, S., Pikridas, M., Unga, F., Savvides, C., Višić, B., Remškar, M., Močnik, G. (2020).
A new optical-based technique for real-time measurements of mineral dust concentration in PM10 using a virtual impactor.
Atmospheric Meas. Tech. 13, 3799–3813.
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-3799-2020  

Product DNAAP is in the process to be patented under European patent application no. 19193244.1.