PMF-AMS Analysis Guide

The PMF Evaluation Tool (PET) was described in Ulbrich et al., ACP 2009. Please cite the tool with this work in publications in which you have used the PET. The PET consists of several Igor procedure files (ipfs). This wiki serves as the help and documentation for the software. To run PMF with the panel, the PMF executable and associated files, accessed separately, are required (see Section 2, Installing PMF with Igor).

The ipfs were written by Ingrid Ulbrich (formerly of the Jimenez Group, University of Colorado, Boulder) and Donna Sueper (Aerodyne Research and Jimenez Group, University of Colorado, Boulder) and Greg Brinkman (Hannigan Group, University of Colorado, Boulder). Questions about this code can be addressed to Donna.

PMF (Positive Matrix Factorization) was developed by Dr. P. Paatero (retired, Dept. of Physics, University of Helsinki). Links to Paatero's PMF documentation and many PMF method papers can be found in Section 9, Other Resources.

Originally, the PMF executable and license files could be purchased by sending an email to Paatero. Now one can freely download the pmf executable files below, but a license file is needed for it to run. Please email Donna for credentials to download the executables. The Swiss company Datalystica is now the sole official seller of the multi-linear engine (ME-2) solver package that contains a license that is used for the PMF executable. Once the ME-2 package is downloaded, copy and rename the ME2key.key file to pmf2key.key and place this in the same folder as the PMF executable files. Please go to https://datalystica.com/me-2-solver/ to purchase ME-2. One license file can be used for all in the same research group.

This Igor toolkit was intended for use in analyzing AMS data, but there are only few assumptions in the toolkit relating to AMS-type data. Some information on ways to create the necessary waves and matrices from non-AMS data are found in Section 3.2.4 below.