Contribution of emission control and atmospheric diffusion ability to the improved air quality in 2015 of China

Abstract:

China experiences extremely severe and frequent PM2.5 (fine particulate matters with diameters less than 2.5 µm) pollution in recent years, arousing unprecedented public concern. Tough targets have been set for three particularly smog-ridden regions: JingJinJi area, the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, requiring these regions to reduce their atmospheric levels of PM2.5 by 25%, 20% and 15% respectively by the year 2017. A lot of mitigation actions have been taken to improve the air quality in China. In January 2013, China began to deploy instruments to measure PM2.5 nationally and released hourly observational data to the public. Observed PM2.5 concentrations showed a significant decrease in 2015 comparing to that of 2014 as shown in Fig.1. Many studies have attributed this kind of air quality improvement to the effect of emission control. However, air quality not only depends on the original emission, the atmospheric abilities of contaminant transfer, spread and wet deposition play a big role in reducing the ambient air pollutants and directly determined by the occurrence of pollution episodes. Here we used the first 2 years PM2.5 observation data in China to quantify the contribution of the effect of emission control and atmospheric ability of diffusing on reducing ambient PM2.5 concentrations. We found that PM2.5 decreased by 24% in 2015 winter (Dec. 2014-Feb. 2015) comparing to that in 2014; and 12% of decrease occurred for the spring time. The inconsistent seasonal improvement of air quality is mainly due to the favorable atmospheric background in 2015, with its frequent precipitation, infrequency of surface calm wind during the wintertime.