Determination of atmospheric amines in boreal forest using unmanned aerial drone with an integrated miniaturized air sampling system

Amines are ubiquitous in the atmosphere and their presence is considered important especially due to their hazard to human health and their contribution to new particle formation that can affect climate change. In this study, tailor-made mesoporous functionalized silica sorbents were used in in-tube extraction (ITEX) and solid-phase microextraction (SPME) Arrow sampling systems for the collection of amines in air. The aerial drone carrying these sampling systems was versatile and flexible allowing the simultaneous use of miniaturized exhaustive (ITEX) and non-exhaustive sampling techniques (SPME Arrow), permitting the reliable collection of amines in both gas phase and aerosol particles. The air samples were collected in summer 2020 at the SMEAR II station (Finland), followed by the analysis using thermal desorption gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Alignment of the chromatograms and spectral deconvolution were used for untargeted data processing. Up to ten different amines were tentatively identified from the samples and then were quantified and semi-quantified by using the partial least squares regression (PLSR) approach. Reference: E. D. Pusfitasari, J. Ruiz-Jimenez, I. Heiskanen, M. Jussila, K. Hartonen and M.-L. Riekkola, manuscript will be submitted to Analist (2021).