Studies on a Severe Dust Storm in East Asia and Its Impact on the Air Quality of Nanjing, China

Abstract

Long-range transport of dust aerosol has severe impact on the atmospheric environment over vast areas. In this study, the features of a severe dust storm and its transport characteristics were investigated during the period from 28 April to 5 May 2011 in East Asia. The combined impact on Nanjing was studied with the observational PM 10 , PM 2.5 , visibility and meteorological data, and the numerical models of HYSPLIT and WRF/Chem. This dust storm was caused by a cyclone on 28 April over arid and semiarid areas in Mongolia and China, and then transported to broad downwind areas including northern, central, and eastern parts of China, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan. Among the available data, the highest hourly PM 10 concentration reached 3.916 mg/m 3 at Jinchang site near the source area. In East China, the coastal cities had poorer air quality than inland ones for two days. Dust aerosol arrived at Nanjing from the northwest, and then north, owing to the movement of synoptic system, mixed with local anthropogenic emissions, resulting in the highest PM 10 concentration of 0.767 mg/m 3 with PM 2.5 level reaching 0.222 mg/m 3 . As the dust storm gradually turned eastward, the dust aerosol went over the seas in the east of the continent and then flowed back to Nanjing. Numerical simulations showed that dust aerosol affecting East China was mainly transported below the altitude of 2.5 km. The vertical profiles of PM 10 and PM 2.5 concentrations showed maxima at the altitude between 0.2 km and 1.3 km.

Multi-model evaluation of short-lived pollutant distributions over east Asia during summer 2008

“…Whilst this region is influenced by dust episodes coming from the north-eastern Asian deserts (e.g. Huang et al, 2013) in spring, the monsoon flux inhibits such events in summer. Figure 9 compares MODIS and model mean/percentile AOD over these regions and the Asian domain (defined as the entire domain minus eastern China and northern India) during August and September 2008.…”

Seasonal Variation and Chemical Characteristics of Atmospheric Particles at Three Islands in the Taiwan Strait

“…In comparison to the past models (such as MM5, Model 3, and SAQM), WRF produces a friendly environment for massively parallel computation by the improved characteristics of non-hydrostatic air flow fields and provides various choices for physical parameterizations (Jiang et al, 2008;Kumar et al, 2012;Lo and Huang, 2012;Huang et al, 2013;Shahid et al, 2015). WRF is good for investigating regional-scale air flow field program analysis (Borge et al, 2008;Peckham et al, 2012).…”

Aerosol optical characteristics and their vertical distributions under enhanced haze pollution events: effect of the regional transport of different aerosol types over eastern China

“…They are transported over long distances and their influence can be identified on regional and even global scales (Chin et al, 2007;Uno et al, 2009;. For instance, Asian dusts are frequently observed in spring and result in air pollution in the downwind areas of East Asia (Kim et al, 2010;Sakai et al, 2002Sakai et al, , 2003Liu et al, 2011;, such as the YRD region, including Nanjing and Shanghai (Yong et al, 2015;Huang et al, 2013).…”