Abstract
Emissions of black carbon (BC) particles from anthropogenic and natural sources contribute to climate change and human health impacts. Therefore, they need to be accurately quantified to develop an effective mitigation strategy. Although the spread of the emission flux estimates for China have recently narrowed under the constraints of atmospheric observations, consensus has not been reached regarding the dominant emission sector. Here, we quantified the contribution of the residential sector, as 64% (44–82%) in 2019, using the response of the observed atmospheric concentration in the outflowing air during Feb–Mar 2020, with the prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic and restricted human activities over China. In detail, the BC emission fluxes, estimated after removing effects from meteorological variability, dropped only slightly (− 18%) during Feb–Mar 2020 from the levels in the previous year for selected air masses of Chinese origin, suggesting the contributions from the transport and industry sectors (36%) were smaller than the rest from the residential sector (64%). Carbon monoxide (CO) behaved differently, with larger emission reductions (− 35%) in the period Feb–Mar 2020, suggesting dominance of non-residential (i.e., transport and industry) sectors, which contributed 70% (48–100%) emission during 2019. The estimated BC/CO emission ratio for these sectors will help to further constrain bottom-up emission inventories. We comprehensively provide a clear scientific evidence supporting mitigation policies targeting reduction in residential BC emissions from China by demonstrating the economic feasibility using marginal abatement cost curves.
Highlights
Emissions of black carbon (BC) particles from anthropogenic and natural sources contribute to climate change and human health impacts
The uncertainty might be reduced when constrained with atmospheric concentration observations, i.e., where the numerical model simulations driven with the emission inventory are compared with observations
During Feb–Mar 2020, when the strongest reduction in the Chinese emission flux was e stimated[12], air masses reached Fukue Island (32.75°N, 128.68°E, 75 m above sea level, Fig. 1, see “Methods”) from major economic centers over China in the 108 hourly cases according to the 120-h backward trajectories, with negligible loss of BC by the wet removal process during travel, as assessed using the accumulated precipitation along the trajectory (APT, see “Methods”) as an index[10,14]
Summary
Emissions of black carbon (BC) particles from anthropogenic and natural sources contribute to climate change and human health impacts. In our previous work, total BC emission fluxes from China and their trend during 2009–2019 have been successfully estimated from atmospheric BC concentration observations at Fukue Island, located downwind of China with respect to the winter monsoon[10]; the contributions from industry and transport and those from the residential sectors were difficult to separate from each other.
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