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Characteristics of Long-Range Transport of Air Pollutants due to Different Transport Patterns over Northeast Asia

Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: This paper investigates the physical and chemical characteristics of long-range transport (LRT) process of air pollutants by employing the MM5-CMAQ and its comparison with local emission dominant (LED) case over northeast Asia. We first classified high air pollution days into LRT and LED cases based on the synoptic meteorological variables of vorticity and geostrophic wind speed/direction at a geopotential level of over 850hPa. LRT cases are further categorized into three types of transport patterns (LRT-I-III) according to the air mass pathways from source regions. LRT-I-III are originated from northern, central, and southern China, respectively, identified by back trajectory analysis. Three LRT-I-III groups have different and unique locations of high pressure and transport pathways. The chemical characteristics showed that the simulated spatial distributions varied in terms of locations of maximum concentrations and the temporal variation of surface concentrations. The primary air pollutants such as $NO_x$ , $PM_{10}$ and $SO_2$ of all of three LRT cases are well transported into Korea peninsula with different concentration levels. Of LRT cases, LRT-II has the greatest effect on air quality of Korea peninsula, followed by LRT-I and LRT-III. In comparison with LRT, the LED case shows relatively higher air pollution concentrations in general, but showed a variety of different air quality levels following the emission strength pattern. These widely varying patterns are impling the case dependent multi-directional approach for the development of indicators of long-range transport process over northeast Asia.
DOI: 10.5572/kosae.2012.28.2.142
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2073765151
FWCI: 0.437
Cites: 5
Cited by: 6
Related to: 10