Severe air pollution events not avoided by reduced anthropogenic activities during COVID-19 outbreak
By Pengfei Wang, Kaiyu Chen, Shengqiang Zhu, Peng Wang, Hongliang Zhang. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2020
644 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Due to the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 in China, almost all avoidable activities in China are prohibited since Wuhan announced lockdown on January 23, 2020. With reduced activities, severe air pollution events still occurred in the North China Plain, causing discussions regarding why severe air pollution was not avoided. The Community Multi-scale Air Quality model was applied during January 01 to February 12, 2020 to study PM2.5 changes under emission reduction scenarios. The estimated emission reduction case (Case 3) better reproduced PM2.5. Compared with the case without emission change (Case 1), Case 3 predicted that PM2.5 concentrations decreased by up to 20% with absolute decreases of 5.35, 6.37, 9.23, 10.25, 10.30, 12.14, 12.75, 14.41, 18.00 and 30.79 μg/m3 in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Shijiazhuang, Tianjin, Jinan, Taiyuan, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, respectively. In high-pollution days with PM2.5 greater than 75 μg/m3, the reductions of PM2.5 in Case 3 were 7.78, 9.51, 11.38, 13.42, 13.64, 14.15, 14.42, 16.95 and 22.08 μg/m3 in Shanghai, Jinan, Shijiazhuang, Beijing, Taiyuan, Xi'an, Tianjin, Zhengzhou and Wuhan, respectively. The reductions in emissions of PM2.5 precursors were ~2 times of that in concentrations, indicating that meteorology was unfavorable during simulation episode. A further analysis shows that benefits of emission reductions were overwhelmed by adverse meteorology and severe air pollution events were not avoided. This study highlights that large emissions reduction in transportation and slight reduction in industrial would not help avoid severe air pollution in China, especially when meteorology is unfavorable. More efforts should be made to completely avoid severe air pollution.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e47acba4415d6579b2849f5ce277bf141eb49dbd
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Citations in the corpus
- Enhanced secondary pollution offset reduction of primary emissions during COVID-19 lockdown in China (2020, background): “Model simulations with fixed emission inventory without reduction considered (to exclude the possible influence of synoptic weather on air pollution) [4,20,21] show very large bias from observations, which also confirms the change in primary reduction (NOx) and elevated O3 and PM2.”
- Have traffic restrictions improved air quality? A shock from COVID-19 (2020, neutral): “On the other hand, the impact of various traffic control policies, adopted by many local governments after the outbreak of COVID19, on air pollution has been observed (Wang et al., 2020).”
- The Response in Air Quality to the Reduction of Chinese Economic Activities During the COVID‐19 Outbreak (2020, result): “These results are consistent with the recent findings of Huang et al. (2020) and Wang et al. (2020).”
- A brief review of socio-economic and environmental impact of Covid-19 (2020, methodology): “Research and Development department of WHO used diagnostics and therapeutics measures by using reverse polymerase chain reactions and genome sequencing for preliminary laboratory experiments (Wang et al. 2020a, b).”
- Social and Travel Lockdown Impact Considering Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) on Air Quality in Megacities of India: Present Benefits, Future Challenges and Way Forward (2020, background): “…survey, it can be concluded that the present air quality scenarios taught a lesson to all the stakeholders belongs to scientific, academic, policy-decision, and politics how to handle the future air quality scenarios and which sectors need to be controlled, how much, and when (Wang et al., 2020).”
- Effect of restricted emissions during COVID-19 on air quality in India (2020, background): “Similar lockdown in China did not result in significant improvement in air quality due to unfavourable meteorology (Wang et al., 2020).”