资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Air pollution sources and their regional transport are important issues for air quality control. The Global-Regional Assimilation and Prediction System coupled with the China Meteorological Administration Unified Atmospheric Chemistry Environment (GRAPES-CUACE) aerosol adjoint model was applied to detect the sensitive primary emission sources of a haze episode in Beijing occurring between 19 and 21 November 2012. The high PM2.5 concentration peaks occurring at 05:00 and 23:00 LT (GMT + 8) over Beijing on 21 November 2012 were set as the cost functions for the aerosol adjoint model. The critical emission regions of the first PM2.5 concentration peak were tracked to the west and south of Beijing, with 2 to 3 days of cumulative transport of air pollutants to Beijing. The critical emission regions of the second peak were mainly located to the south of Beijing, where southeasterly moist air transport led to the hygroscopic growth of particles and pollutant convergence in front of the Taihang Mountains during the daytime on 21 November. The temporal variations in the sensitivity coefficients for the two PM2.5 concentration peaks revealed that the response time of the onset of Beijing haze pollution from the local primary emissions is approximately 1-2 h and that from the surrounding primary emissions it is approximately 7-12 h. The upstream Hebei province has the largest impact on the two PM2.5 concentration peaks, and the contribution of emissions from Hebei province to the first PM2.5 concentration peak (43.6 %) is greater than that to the second PM2.5 concentration peak (41.5 %). The second most influential province for the 05:00 LT PM2.5 concentration peak is Beijing (31.2 %), followed by Shanxi (9.8 %), Tianjin (9.8 %), and Shandong (5.7 %). The second most influential province for the 23:00 LT PM2.5 concentration peak is Beijing (35.7 %), followed by Shanxi (8.1 %), Shandong (8.0 %), and Tianjin (6.7 %). The adjoint model results were compared with the forward sensitivity simulations of the Models-3/CMAQ system. The two modeling approaches are highly comparable in their assessments of atmospheric pollution control schemes for critical emission regions, but the adjoint method has higher computational efficiency than the forward sensitivity method. The results also imply that critical regional emission reduction could be more efficient than individual peak emission control for improving regional PM2.5 air quality.