Abstract
High air pollution levels have become a nationwide problem in China, but limited attention has been paid to prefecture-level cities. Furthermore, different time resolutions between air pollutant level data and meteorological parameters used in many previous studies can lead to biased results. Supported by synchronous measurements of air pollutants and meteorological parameters, including PM2.5, PM10, total suspended particles (TSP), CO, NO2, O3, SO2, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, at 16 urban sites in Xiangyang, China, from 1 March 2018 to 28 February 2019, this paper: (1) analyzes the overall air quality using an air quality index (AQI); (2) captures spatial dynamics of air pollutants with pollution point source data; (3) characterizes pollution variations at seasonal, day-of-week and diurnal timescales; (4) detects weekend effects and holiday (Chinese New Year and National Day holidays) effects from a statistical point of view; (5) establishes relationships between air pollutants and meteorological parameters. The principal results are as follows: (1) PM2.5 and PM10 act as primary pollutants all year round and O3 loses its primary pollutant position after November; (2) automobile manufacture contributes to more particulate pollutants while chemical plants produce more gaseous pollutants. TSP concentration is related to on-going construction and road sprinkler operations help alleviate it; (3) an unclear weekend effect for all air pollutants is confirmed; (4) celebration activities for the Chinese New Year bring distinctly increased concentrations of SO2 and thereby enhance secondary particulate pollutants; (5) relative humidity and wind speed, respectively, have strong negative correlations with coarse particles and fine particles. Temperature positively correlates with O3.
Highlights
Air pollution is caused by manifold particulate and gaseous pollutants, namely, particles with aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5 ) and less than 10 μm (PM10 ), and total suspended particles (TSP), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ), ozone (O3 ) and sulfur dioxide (SO2 ) [1]
To maintain data validity in the subsequent analyses, a data check in compliance with the Chinese Ambient Air Quality Standard [27] was conducted on the platform of R, and we found some missing values for TSP, wind speed (WS) and wind direction direction (WD) of Station 15 and Station 16, further demonstrated to be the storage loss
We analyzed the spatiotemporal variations of particulate and gaseous pollutants and their relations to meteorological parameters in Xiangyang, China, from 1 March 2018 to 28 February
Summary
Prolonged high levels of air pollution have been verified to have significant adverse impacts on human health: (1) particulate matters, especially fine particles, can increase the risk of cerebrovascular diseases, heart diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD), acute respiratory infections and lung cancer [2,3,4,5]; (2) intensive exposures to O3 and NO2 can lead to COPD, respiratory morbidity and premature death [2,5,6,7]; (3) high levels of CO and SO2 can cause cataracts, respiratory symptoms and COPD [2,8,9]. Public Health 2020, 17, 136; doi:10.3390/ijerph17010136 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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