To investigate the characteristics of diurnal variation of humic-like substances (HULIS) in atmospheric aerosols during winter in Changzhou, a total of 64 fine particle (PM2.5) samples were collected from January 1 to February 28, 2017. In this study, the concentration as well as light absorption parameters of humic-like substances of carbon (HULIS-C) were examined. The results showed that the average day PM2.5 and HULIS-C concentrations were 122.60 μg·m-3 and 4.18 μg·m-3, respectively, slightly higher than those (111.72 μg·m-3 and 3.74 μg·m-3) at night. Via UV-vis analysis, we found that the ratios of absorbance at 250 nm (A250) of HULIS and WSOA (day:~77%, night:~75%) were significantly higher than the concentration ratios of HULIS-C and WSOC (day:~51%, night:~50%), indicating that more UV-absorbing substances and poly-conjugated aromatic structures exist in HULIS. The daytime E250/E365 and SUVA280 in HULIS were close to the nighttime ones, indicating that there was no obvious difference between day and night in HULIS with reference to aromaticity and molecular weight. There were no significant differences in MAE365 and AAE300-400 of HULIS between day and night. In addition, to obtain the main influencing factors of HULIS in winter in Changzhou, the correlation analysis of HULIS-C and other chemical components were conducted. The results show that biomass burning, fossil fuel combustion, factory emissions, and especially secondary formation, were the main influencing factors. Moreover, daytime HULIS were mainly influenced by secondary reaction of anthropogenic precursor contaminants, while nighttime HULIS were affected not only by secondary formation by but by also primary combustion emissions.
Keywords: PM2.5; day-night characteristics; humic-like substances(HULIS); source analysis.