Carbonaceous aerosols are currently the most important with respect to aerosol effect on climate and health and are known for their large spatio-temporal and effect based uncertainties. They have an indirect effect in altering cloud properties, thereby having a major contribution in determining the radiation budget of the earth’s atmosphere. An important part of carbonaceous aerosols are BC and OC that form only due to incomplete combustion. Combustion also results into emission of many effluent species along with carbon aerosols including carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and particles such as silicaceous fly ash and trace metals). Characteristic ratio of OC, CO, CO2 and CH4 to that of aerosol black carbon can be used as an indicative of different combustion processes. In this talk, I will discuss about the importance of these species in determining the air quality. Then I will describe the various instruments that can be used to provide real time simultaneous measurement of these species. In the end, I will present cases where such simultaneous measurements were taken and used for describing the temporal variations, source identification and transport patterns due to combustion activities.