The Environmental Research Laboratory (ERL) is a building that hasn't been used for a while and was up for demolition this summer. Fortunately, Prof. Prather was able to delay the demolition for a few weeks to allow us to complete this study. In this picture you see the building at the edge of campus, with our weather station on the roof. the day after we completed the study, the building was torn down and a parking lot is being built in its place.
 
 
 
 

ERL was selected for this study because of its close proximity to the freeway (20 feet away). In this picture you see the view from the roof of ERL to the southwest.
 
 

We were able to run our ATOFMS instruments in a room on the freeway side of the building. This allowed us to keep the samling lines very short - we just had to stick them out of the windows. As the building was already almost ready for demolition, the air conditioning system was no longer working. This led to very high temperatures in the buliding, especially as the study took place during the hottest time of this year (highest temperatures above 110 F). In this picture you see our instruments, Elwood on the left and Jake on the right and some fans to keep the temperature in the building somewhat acceptable.
 
 

In addition to the single particle information we get from our ATOFMS instruments, we were also collecting other data, su ch as temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and wind direction (weather station on the roof), PM_2.5 mass data with a TEOM, and ozone, NO_Y and nitric acid concentrations. The TEOM can be seen in the picture above, between the two ATOFMS instruments. In the next picture you see the weather station on the roof of ERL.
 
 

Given that this building was so close to our labs (right across campus!), we could just push the instruments back to their home. All the other equipment had to be moved back too, and for that we could fortunately use the truck of one of our graduate students. Here you see another grad student, Chris Noble, helping to load equipment into the truck.
 
 
 
 
 

As mentioned before, we just made it out of the building before it was torn down. In the next two pictures you can see what was left of our nice site after the wreckers were there!