Long-Term Analysis of Aerosol Optical Depth over the Huaihai Economic Region (HER): Possible Causes and Implications

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The quality of air is increasingly affecting regional climate and human activity. Collection 6 aerosol products retrieved from the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra satellite were validated based on CE-318 sun photometric data to analyze their applicability in the Huaihai economic region (HER) at the Xuzhou and Shouxian sites. The spatio-temporal variations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) were also analyzed over HER from 2000 to 2016, with analyses of the correlation with potential driving factors, including meteorology, vegetation and human factors. HER is an economic cooperation organization with multiple industrial structures, containing coal resource-based cities, a national transportation hub and agricultural and high-altitude areas, which shows regional differences in AOD. The results suggest that MODIS Terra AOD products show good agreement with ground observations, with correlation coefficients of above 0.84 in HER, and the main pollutants for high AOD values are fine particles (the mean Ångström exponent was 1.16). The average annual change in AOD varied with a weak growth trend over the past 17 years, while a transition in 2012 made the tendency change from upward to downward due to the extensive cooperation of cities in the joint prevention and control of the deterioration of the ecological environment. The largest monthly mean AOD value appeared in June, which resulted from significant agricultural residue burning. The spatial distribution of multi-year average AOD occurred with a banded high-value center, extending from the north-west to the south-east. The high aerosol loadings were located in resource-based cities, and industrially developed and south-eastern coastal areas, whereas the regions with relatively low AOD in HER were distributed in the southern agricultural and northern high-altitude areas. The AOD value in the western, northern, and eastern coastal areas of HER showed a significant increasing trend, while no area exhibited a decreasing trend. The average wind speed has the largest negative correlation with the AOD value in terms of the natural driving factors, and GDP (gross domestic product) was more positively correlated with AOD with respect to the human factors, in comparison with population density.