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High secondary aerosol contribution to particulate pollution during haze events in China

Abstract

Rapid industrialization and urbanization in developing countries has led to an increase in air pollution, along a similar trajectory to that previously experienced by the developed nations1. In China, particulate pollution is a serious environmental problem that is influencing air quality, regional and global climates, and human health2,3. In response to the extremely severe and persistent haze pollution experienced by about 800 million people during the first quarter of 2013 (refs 4, 5), the Chinese State Council announced its aim to reduce concentrations of PM2.5 (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 micrometres) by up to 25 per cent relative to 2012 levels by 2017 (ref. 6). Such efforts however require elucidation of the factors governing the abundance and composition of PM2.5, which remain poorly constrained in China3,7,8. Here we combine a comprehensive set of novel and state-of-the-art offline analytical approaches and statistical techniques to investigate the chemical nature and sources of particulate matter at urban locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xi’an during January 2013. We find that the severe haze pollution event was driven to a large extent by secondary aerosol formation, which contributed 30–77 per cent and 44–71 per cent (average for all four cities) of PM2.5 and of organic aerosol, respectively. On average, the contribution of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) and secondary inorganic aerosol (SIA) are found to be of similar importance (SOA/SIA ratios range from 0.6 to 1.4). Our results suggest that, in addition to mitigating primary particulate emissions, reducing the emissions of secondary aerosol precursors from, for example, fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning is likely to be important for controlling China’s PM2.5 levels and for reducing the environmental, economic and health impacts resulting from particulate pollution.

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Figure 1: Chemical composition and source apportionment of PM2.5 collected during the high pollution events of 5–25 January 2013 at the urban sites of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xi’an.
Figure 2: Source contribution to total particulate and organic matter.
Figure 3: Fossil and non-fossil fractional contributions of each source during low and high PM2.5 levels observed in different cities.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 290605, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SAPMAV, no.200021_13016, WOOSHI, no. 200021L_140590, and Ambizione, PZ00P2_131673), the Swiss Competence Centers Environment and Sustainability as well as Energy and Mobility under project OPTIWARES, the National Science Foundation of China (no. 40925009), the “Strategic Priority Research Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA05100402), and the Helmholtz Virtual Institute of Complex Molecular Systems in Environmental Health – Aerosol and Health (HICE). The help of G. Salazar (University of Bern) during 14C analysis is acknowledged.

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Contributions

R.-J.H., I.E.H. and C.B. wrote the paper. R.-J.H., J.-J.C. and A.S.H.P. designed the study. R.-J.H., I.E.H., C.B. and K.R.D. performed the offline AMS analysis. Y.Z., P.Z. and S. S. performed the 14C analysis. M.S. performed the IC analysis. G.A. and J.S.-K. performed the TD-GC-MS analysis. R.-J.H., I.E.H., C.B. and A.S.H.P. analysed the data. All authors reviewed and commented on the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jun-Ji Cao or André S. H. Prévôt.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains additional information on the sample collection and sampling sites (Section 1); details of the chemical analysis (Section 2); extensive evaluation of a set of environmentally optimal solutions for source apportionment of PM2.5 and OC using the CMB and ME-2 models (Section 3); evaluation of model uncertainty and the sensitivity of the results to model inputs as well as the estimate of the contribution of fossil and non-fossil sources to secondary organic aerosol (Section 4); examination of potentially unidentified sources (Section 5); representativeness of the measurement sites (Section 6) and relevance of SOA formation (Section 7). The Supplementary Information also includes Supplementary Figures S1-S30, Supplementary Tables S1-S3 and additional references. (PDF 2634 kb)

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Huang, RJ., Zhang, Y., Bozzetti, C. et al. High secondary aerosol contribution to particulate pollution during haze events in China. Nature 514, 218–222 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13774

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