Formulation and evaluation of environmental policy depends upon receptor models that are used to assess the impact and nature of pollution sources affecting the air quality for a region of interest. Pollution source apportionment involves the use of ambient air quality data to estimate the abundance of pollutants emanating from the various pollution sources. Many approaches for pollution source apportionment have been considered, most of which are based on the chemical mass balance equations. The simplest approaches for identifying
the pollution source contributions require that the pollution source profiles are known. However, when little or nothing is known about the nature of the pollution sources, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and other multivariate approaches have been employed. In this talk, we briefly consider the estimation of pollution source contributions using several different approaches, and we discuss the use of partial source profile information, meteorological data, and particle size distribution data for enhancing such analyses.
