Long Term Trends in New York: PM2.5 Mass and Particle Components

Abstract

Measurements of PM 2.5 mass and particle components over a 14-15 year period are used to explore trends at urban and rural locations across New York State. Such data are used to determine compliance with national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS), as well as track the effectiveness of reductions in source pollutant emissions. Since 2000 annual mean PM 2.5 mass shows a downward trend with decreases of 4-7 µg m -3 in urban areas versus 3-4 µg m -3 for rural background sites. Much of this change can be attributed to particle sulfate (SO 4 ) and nitrate (NO 3 ) which showed annual decreases of 2-3 µg m -3 and 0.5-1.0 µg m -3 , respectively. Determining accurate trends for the carbonaceous particle material is challenging due to the changes in the carbon sampling and analysis methods which impact the measurements. Analysis of the data indicate some decreases in particle elemental carbon (EC) but little change in the organic carbon fraction (OC). Significant improvements in air quality are observed since 2000, when New York City metropolitan area exceeded the 1997 annual PM 2.5 standard of 15 µg m -3 , to the present conditions where it meets the current standard of 12 µg m -3 . Further improvements in air quality may benefit from controls on carbonaceous material which is currently the major component of PM 2.5 .

Synergetic Satellite Trend Analysis of Aerosol and Warm Cloud Properties ver Ocean and Its Implication for Aerosol‐Cloud Interactions

“…Studies showed that AOD in China had increased until around 2007 and has decreased over the last decade de Leeuw et al, 2018;Sogacheva et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2017;Zhao et al, 2017). These satellite-based AOD trends are generally consistent with previous studies based on atmospheric visibility (Che et al, 2007;Hu et al, 2017;Li et al, 2016) or ground-based aerosol properties, such as PM 2.5 (Hasheminassab et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2015;Rattigan et al, 2016;Yang et al, 2018). Long-term trends in cloud properties, such as liquid water path (LWP), cloud effective radius (CER), cloud optical thickness (COT), and cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC), have also been examined (e.g., Bennartz & Rausch, 2017;Elsaesser et al, 2017;Li et al, 2018;Manaster et al, 2017;McCoy et al, 2018;Mishra, 2019;Sreekanth, 2016;Stengel et al, 2017;Zhao et al, 2016).…”

Prenatal and early life exposures to ambient air pollution and development

“…31 Our study takes place in Upstate New York, a region with relatively low air pollution. 32 The PM 2.5 concentrations studied reflected this relatively small range of exposure during the study period. The lack of variability may explain the weak association with prenatal exposures, but the findings also merit attention since we still see evidence of some effect even in an area with low levels of pollution.…”

Characterization and SCR Performance of Nano-Structured Iron-Manganese Oxides: Effect of Annealing Temperature

“…Nitric oxides originating from stationary power plants are important pollutants causing a series of serious environmental problems, such as acid rain, ozone depletion, photochemical smog and greenhouse gas (Sahu, 2015;Zahaf, 2015;Lu et al, 2016;Rattigan et al, 2016). Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) has been proved to be an effective technology for the reduction of NO x by NH 3 over different catalysts due to its high efficiency and economic efficiency (Yu, 2015;Jiang et al, 2017;Yu et al, 2017).…”