The improvement of dust model applying modified soil component of dust source over East Asia.

Abstract:

The East Asia region is the world's most populous area with a rapidly growing economy resulting in large air pollutant emissions. Asian mineral dust from Gobi Desert, Loess Plateau and barren mixed soil in Northern China and Mongolia has a major impact on the air quality in the Seoul Metropolitan Area. These mineral aerosols PM10 (particulate matter less than 10 um in diameter) concentration frequently exceeds the daily ambient air quality standards of 100μgm-3, and the number of exceedance days of daily PM10 reached about 40 times annually. The PM10 prediction by a regional chemical transport model without the dust emission shows an intrinsic tendency to underestimation according to previous studies in this region, especially for the soil originated coarse PM. This is partially due to the uncertainty of fugitive dust emissions.

This study is aim to improve dust model(ADAM2 – Asian Dust Aeorosol Model 2) by changing soil component over source regions using Harmonized World Soil Database. ADAM2 has four dust components of the Gobi Desert, sand dsert, Loess Plateau and barren mixed soil. The soil components, however, should be updated as current and detailed soil components. Therfore, we apply updated dust model with CTM(Chemical Transport Model), CMAQ(Community Multi-scale Air Quality Model) to simulate dust concentration over East Asia. It is found that dust concentration with updated dust model is better agreement with observation during dust event periods, compared with standard dust model.