Air pollution over the North China Plain and its implication of regional transport: A new sight from the observed evidences.

High concentrations of the fine particles (PM2.5) are frequently observed during all seasons over the North China Plain (NCP) region in recent years. In NCP, the contributions of regional transports to certain area, e.g. Beijing city, are often discussed and estimated by models when considering an effective air pollution controlling strategy. In this study, we selected three sites from southwest to northeast in NCP, in which the concentrations of air pollutants displayed a multi-step decreasing trend in space. An approach based on the measurement results at these sites has been developed to calculate the relative contributions of the minimal local emission (MinLEC) and the maximum regional transport (MaxRTC) to the air pollutants (e.g., SO2, NO2, CO, PM2.5) in Beijing. The minimal influence of local emission is estimated by the difference of the air pollutants' concentrations between urban and rural areas under the assumption of a similar influence of regional transport. Therefore, it's convenient to estimate the contributions of local emission from regional transport based on the selective measurement results instead of the complex numerical model simulation. For the whole year of 2013, the averaged contributions of MinLEC (MaxRTC) for NO2, SO2, PM2.5 and CO are 61.7% (30.7%), 46.6% (48%), 52.1% (40.2%) and 35.8% (45.5%), respectively. The diurnal variation of MaxRTC for SO2, PM2.5 and CO shows an increased pattern during the afternoon and reached a peak (more than 50%) around 18:00, which indicates that the regional transport is the important role for the daytime air pollution in Beijing.

Below-cloud wet scavenging of soluble inorganic ions by rain in Beijing during the summer of 2014.

Wet deposition is one of the most important and efficient removal mechanisms in the reduction of air pollution. As a key parameter determining wet deposition, the wet scavenging coefficient (WSC) is widely used in chemical transport models (CTMs) and reported values have large uncertainties. In this study, a high-resolution observational dataset of the soluble inorganic aerosols (SO42-, NO3- and NH4+, hereafter SNA) in the air and in rainwater during multiple precipitation events was collected using sequential sampling and used to estimate the below-cloud WSC in Beijing during the summer of 2014. The average concentrations of SNA in precipitation during the observational period were 7.9 mg/L, 6.2 mg/L and 4.6 mg/L, with the contributions from below-cloud scavenging constituting 56%, 61% and 47% of this, respectively. The scavenging ratios of SNA (i.e., the ratio of the concentrations in rain to concentrations in the air) were used with the height of the cloud base and the precipitation intensity to estimate the WSC. The estimated WSC of SO42- is comparable to that reported elsewhere. The relationship between the below-cloud WSC and the precipitation intensity followed an exponential power distribution (K=aPb) for SNA. In contrast to previous studies, this study considers the differences between the chemical compositions of the SNA, with the highest WSC for NO3-, followed by those of SO42- and NH4+. Therefore, we recommend that CTMs include ion specific WSCs in the future.