Abstract
Dust particles in the atmosphere play an important role in air pollution, climate change, and biogeochemical cycles. Some of the dominant sources of dust in mid-latitude regions are in Asia. An intense dust storm engulfed Northern China at the beginning of May 2017, and PM10 mass concentrations of 1500–2000 μg m−3 were measured near the dust source region. We combined numerical simulations, air quality monitoring data, and satellite retrievals to investigate dust emission and transport during this event. We found that the event was closely related to cold front activity, characterized by increased wind speed, which increased dust emission. We improved the dust scheme using a local dust size distribution to better simulate the dust emission flux. We found that accurate parametrization of the dust size distribution was important to effectively simulate both dust emission and ambient particle concentration. We showed that using a local dust size distribution substantially improved the accuracy of the simulation, allowing both the spatial distribution of pollution caused by the dust storm and temporal variability in the pollution to be captured.
Highlights
Atmospheric aerosols play a vital role in air quality and climate change, and negatively affect human health [1,2]
We investigated dust emission and transport during this dust storm by combining numerical simulations, air quality monitoring data, and satellite retrievals
The Global Ozone Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) dust emission scheme [17] was coupled with the Carbon Bond mechanism software version Z (CBMZ) and model for simulating aerosol interactions and chemistry (MOSAIC)
Summary
Atmospheric aerosols play a vital role in air quality and climate change, and negatively affect human health [1,2]. This scheme is based on a complex parameterization that assumes that dust uplift is mainly initiated by saltation bombardment It has performed well when estimating dust emission fluxes in several regions around the world [18]. It has clear limitations when applied to East Asia It has been found in previous studies of Asian dust storms that the GOCART dust emission scheme markedly underpredicts particle concentrations and aerosol optical depths compared with in situ observations and satellite retrievals. Assumptions related to the particle size distribution in a dust emission parameterization scheme have been found to play important roles in determining the atmospheric concentrations of dust [21]. The dust emission flux was simulated more effectively than would otherwise have been possible by improving the GOCART dust scheme using a local particle size distribution. We evaluated the improved GOCART scheme and assessed the importance of accurately parameterizing the dust size distribution
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