Abstract
In the past decades, continuous efforts have been made at a national level to reduce Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) emissions in the atmosphere over China. However, public concern and related research mostly deal with tropospheric NO2 columns rather than ground-level NO2 concentrations, but actually ground-level NO2 concentrations are more closely related to anthropogenic emissions, and directly affect human health. This paper presents one method to derive the ground-level NO2 concentrations using the total column of NO2 observed from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and the simulations from the Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) model in China. One year’s worth of data from 2014 was processed and the results compared with ground-based NO2 measurements from a network of China’s National Environmental Monitoring Centre (CNEMC). The standard deviation between ground-level NO2 concentrations over China, the CMAQ simulated measurements and in-situ measurements by CNEMC for January was 21.79 μg/m3, which was improved to a standard deviation of 18.90 μg/m3 between our method and CNEMC data. Correlation coefficients between the CMAQ simulation and in-situ measurements were 0.75 for January and July, and they were improved to 0.80 and 0.78, respectively. Our results revealed that the method presented in this paper can be used to better measure ground-level NO2 concentrations over China.
Highlights
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ) is a pollutant trace gas in the atmosphere that plays an important role in atmospheric tropospheric chemistry and radiative heating [1,2,3]
NO2 concentrations released by China’s National Environmental Monitoring Centre (CNEMC) to tropospheric NO columns by Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), OMI observations over China in 2014
This paper presents a means of estimating ground-level NO2 concentrations based on OMI tropospheric NO2 columns and the vertical distribution of tropospheric NO2 profiles simulated using the RAMS-Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) model
Summary
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ) is a pollutant trace gas in the atmosphere that plays an important role in atmospheric tropospheric chemistry and radiative heating [1,2,3]. Atmospheric ozone chemistry is affected by NO2 in terms of ozone formation, whereas in the troposphere, NO2 regulates the surface ozone level and maintains oxidizing capacities [4]; exposure to ozone leads to adverse health effects for humans [5]. NO2 can initiate the formation of acid rain and can indirectly affect the global climate by perturbing greenhouse gas, ozone and methane levels [3]. NO2 is a precursor of ammonium nitrate, which is an important component of atmospheric particulate matter pollution [17]
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