Chemical evolution of rainfall in China's first eco-civilization demonstration city: Implication for the provenance identification of pollutants and rainwater acid neutralization

Abstract

Rainfall chemistry is a vital indicator for reflecting anthropogenic/natural input on atmospheric quality, and the rainfall process is also the main sink of air contaminants, which has received widely concerns by all walks of life. However, the chemical compositions, sources of major solutes, historical evolution, and their determinants of rainwater in Chinese urban area, which is hotspot of atmospheric pollutant emission, are unclear under the dual background of fast economic development and eco-civilization construction. To decipher these issues, the latest year data of observation-based rainwater chemistry and the historical rainwater data, and air pollution data of China's first eco-civilization demonstration city were integrated and studied. The results presented that SO42− (53.4 %) and NO3− (28.8 %), Ca2+ (46.5 %) and NH4+ (37.9 %) dominated the present rainwater anions and cations. The historical changes in the relative proportion of rainwater ions (e.g., the holistic decreasing trend of SO42−) revealed the reduction and management achievement of atmospheric pollutant emission driven by different stages of eco-civilization city construction. The atmospheric components were well removed by rainfall scouring and all the rainwater ions showed obvious temporal variations. The concentrations of most of ions were higher in winter but lower in summer due to the key factors of meteorological factor (mainly rainfall amount) and the seasonal variations of source contribution. The stoichiometry-based source identification and relative contribution calculation reflected that anthropogenic input was the most primary contributor of NO3− (99.4 %) and SO42− (95.4 %), and the contribution of fixed emission source was relatively higher than that of traffic sources. The NH4+ was defined as the anthropogenic input ion (urban wastes and fuel combustion), while all Cl− and Na+ were from oceanic input. In contrast, terrigenous input represented the most important origin of Ca2+, K+, and Mg2+, with relative contribution of 99.5 %, 97.0 %, and 90.7 %, respectively. The high neutralization factor (NF, about 2.0) values and neutralizing to acidifying potential (NP/AP, about 1.7) ratios and their increasing trend in past few decades revealed the fact of rainwater acid being highly neutralized under the background of eco-civilization city construction.