Coarse particulate matter air quality in East Asia: implications for fine particulate nitrate
Abstract
Coarse particulate matter (PM) is a serious air pollution problem in East Asia. Analysis of air quality network observations in the North China Plain and the Seoul Metropolitan Area shows that it is mainly anthropogenic and has decreased by 21% over 2015-2019. This anthropogenic coarse PM is generally not included in air quality models but scavenges nitric acid to suppress the formation of fine particulate (PM2.5) nitrate, a major contributor to PM2.5 pollution. Including it in the GEOS-Chem model decreases simulated PM2.5 nitrate to improve agreement with observations. Decreasing anthropogenic coarse PM over 2015-2019 directly increases PM2.5 nitrate in summer, offsetting the effect of other emission controls, while in winter it increases the sensitivity of PM2.5 nitrate to ammonia and sulfur dioxide emissions. Our work implies the need for stronger ammonia and nitrogen oxides emission controls to improve PM2.5 air quality as coarse PM continues to decrease.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.03625,
title = {Coarse particulate matter air quality in East Asia: implications for fine particulate nitrate},
author = {Shixian Zhai and Daniel J. Jacob and Drew C. Pendergrass and Nadia K. Colombi and Viral Shah and Laura Hyesung Yang and Qiang Zhang and Shuxiao Wang and Hwajin Kim and Yele Sun and Jin-Soo Choi and Jin-Soo Park and Gan Luo and Fangqun Yu and Jung-Hun Woo and Younha Kim and Jack E. Dibb and Taehyoung Lee and Jin-Seok Han and Bruce E. Anderson and Ke Li and Hong Liao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.03625},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
We have revised this work considerably and want to avoid the confusion