Abstract
ABSTRACT Due to profound impact on climate and human health, air quality has attracted attention from all levels of the civil society. The key step in the provision of required tools for the society to tackle the complex air quality problem is to characterize it in a comprehensive manner with a long-term perspective. Here, we describe a continuous and comprehensive observation station and its accompanying state-of-the-art instrumentation that was established to investigate the complex urban atmospheric environment in a rapidly developing Chinese Megacity. The station, located in downtown Beijing, aims to study air quality by identifying the major atmospheric pollutants and key processes determining their formation and loss mechanisms. A few hundreds of parameters are continuously measured with the state-of-the-art instruments, including trace gas concentrations, aerosol particle size distributions, and mass concentrations, covering aerosol particle chemical composition from molecules to micrometer-sized aerosol particles. This produced long-term, comprehensive big data with around bytes per year. In this paper, we provide an overview on the facilities of the station, the instrumentation used, the workflow of continuous observations and examples of results from 2018 to 2019 and a basis for establishing a modern long-term, comprehensive atmospheric urban observation station in other megacities.
Highlights
Quality by identifying the major atmospheric pollutants and key processes determining their formation and loss mechanisms
The Particle Size Magnifier (PSM), the Neutral cluster & Air Ion Specter (NAIS), and the DEG-SPMS directly sample from the window with individual sampling tubes to reduce the loss of ultrafine particles, while the Aerodynamic Particle Sizer (APS) shares a sampling tubing and a PM10 inlet with the Particle Size Distribution (PSD) from the roof, and the Differential Mobility Particle Sizer (DMPS) shares a sampling tubing and a PM2.5 inlet with the ACSM and the Aethalometer, which will be discussed
Intercomparisons will be further carried out between different instruments in our laboratory, such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) concentration measured by the Single Photon Ionization Mass Spectrometer (SPI-MS) and the PTR-MS, the NO concentration measured by the NOx and NOy analyzers, the HONO concentration measured by the Long Optical Path Absorption Photometer (LOPAP) and the MARGA and the particle size distribution measured by different instruments
Summary
Air pollution has become a serious environmental issue in the world since 1950s when the London smog (dominated by H2SO4 and particulate matter (PM)) (Davis, Bell, & Fletcher, 2002) and Los Angeles smog (dominated by O3, peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) and PM) (Hidy, 2018) became iconic events. As for the secondary formation of aerosol, a concept of haze chemistry, whose intrinsic characteristics is the synergistic effect among different gas-phase and/or particle-phase pollutants on secondary processes leading to increase in aerosol number (Chu et al, 2019; Kerminen et al, 2018) and mass concentrations (Cheng et al, 2016; Guo et al, 2014; Huang et al, 2014; Wang et al, 2016; Xue et al, 2019), has been proposed (Cheng et al, 2016). The long-term goals of the AHL/BUCT Station are to identify the crucial pollutants and key processes governing air pollution in the megacities, to understand the sources of crucial air pollutants, to quantify the formation mechanism of secondary pollutants and to assess the possible impacts of air pollution on human health, climate change and ecological systems
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