SAFICA: Sarajevo Winter Field Campaign

Particularly during the winter season, urban centers in countries of the Western Balkan region are experiencing some of the poorest air quality globally due to the extensive use of solid fuels and an old vehicle fleet. Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where topography and meteorology cause the pollutants to be trapped within the city plain during the cold winter period. Nevertheless, a detailed characterization of aerosol chemical composition including its organic component (organic aerosol or OA) to elucidate their emission sources and atmospheric processing has not been done in BiH prior to the SArajevo Canton Winter FIeld CAmpaign 2017-2018 (SAFICA). To address this, the SAFICA project took place in the winter of 2017-2018 at four sites in Sarajevo Canton, with online aerosol measurements (black carbon, particle number concentration and size distribution) and collection of daily, continuous filter PM10 samples for subsequent offline laboratory analyses. SAFICA aimed to yield crucial, not previously available information about the emission sources and transformations of the Sarajevo Canton aerosol.