Dust storms come to Central and Southwestern China, too: implications from a major dust event in Chongqing

Abstract

Abstract. Dust storms from major Asian sources are usually carried by northwesterly or westerly winds over Northern and Southeastern China to the Pacific Ocean. These pathways leave Central and Southwestern China nearly free of incursions. But a strong dust event on 5-6 May 2005 was captured in a 15-month series of weekly filter samples of PM 2.5 at three sites in Chongqing. It illustrated that desert dust can be transported to this region, and sometimes strongly. Annual PM 2.5 and dust were similar at the three sites, but higher than in simultaneous samples in Beijing. High correlations of dust concentrations were found between the cities during spring, indicating that Asian dust affects a broader swath of China than is often realized. During the event, the concentrations of mineral dust were high at all sites (20-30 µg m −3 ; 15%-20% of PM 2.5 in Chongqing, and 15 µg m −3 ; 20%-30% of PM 2.5 in Beijing), and were part of a broader spring maximum. The proportions of crustal elements and pollution-derived components such as Pb, SO

China Source Profile Shared Service (CSPSS): The Chinese PM2.5 Database for Source Profiles

“…This component can be resuspended from bare soil by local winds (Belis et al, 2013). Also long-range transport such as Asian dust events (ADEs) can touch north even to the southwest China (Zhao et al, 2010;Li et al, 2015). Paved road dust could be characterized by several metals such as Sn, Sb and Ba, which may be attributed to the effect of motor vehicle contributions such as brake, oil drips and tire wear (Pant et al, 2015).…”

Shamals and climate variability in the Northern Arabian/Persian Gulf from 1973 to 2012

“…Shamal events accompanied by rising dust originating from the Mesopotamian region (Iraq, E Syria, and SE Turkey) (Wilkerson, 1991) can lead to dust storms ( Figure 1). The standard definition of dust storms is when visibility falls to ≤1 km because of dust (Kutiel and Furman, 2003;Goudie, 2009;Zhao et al, 2010;Al-dousari and Al-awadhi, 2012). Presently there is no agreed upon and clear definition of a Shamal event.…”

Characteristics of PM<sub>2.5</sub> speciation in representative megacities and across China

“…Besides this parallel sampling in the two megacities, we continued collecting PM 2.5 samples with the same sampler and same sampling duration at TH from 1999 through 2008. Details of sampling procedure and quality control have been provided in our previous work (He et al, 2001;Zhao et al, 2010). Briefly, operating at a flow rate of 0.4 l min −1 , the first channel was used to collect PM 2.5 with a Teflon filter for elemental analysis.…”