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The physical parameterizations have important influence on model performance in precipitation simulation and prediction; however, previous investigations are seldom conducted at very high resolution over Hebei Province, which is often influenced by extreme events such as droughts and floods. In this paper, the influence of parameterization schemes and analysis nudging on precipitation simulation is investigated using the WRF (weather research and forecasting) model with many sensitivity experiments at the cumulus "gray-zone" resolution (5 km). The model performance of different sensitivity simulations is determined by a comparison with the local high-quality observational data. The results indicate that the WRF model generally reproduces the distribution of precipitation well, and the model tends to underestimate precipitation compared with the station observations. The sensitivity simulation with the Tiedtke cumulus parameterization scheme combined with the Thompson microphysics scheme shows the best model performance, with the highest temporal correlation coefficient (0.45) and lowest root mean square error (0.34 mm/day). At the same time, analysis nudging, which incorporates observational information into simulation, can improve the model performance in precipitation simulation. Further analysis indicates that the negative bias in precipitation may be associated with the negative bias in relative humidity, which in turn is associated with the positive bias in temperature and wind speed. This study highlights the role of parameterization schemes and analysis nudging in precipitation simulation and provides a valuable reference for further investigations on precipitation forecasting applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the critical global crises curbing world development and sustainability, air quality degradation has been a long-lasting and increasingly urgent one and it has been sufficiently proven to pose severe threats to human health and social welfare. A higher level of model prediction accuracy can play a fundamental role in air quality assessment and enhancing human well-being. In this paper, four types of machine learning models—random forest model, ridge regression model, support vector machine model, extremely randomized trees model—were adopted to predict PM2.5 concentration in ten cities in the Jing-Jin-Ji region of north China based on multi-sources spatiotemporal data including air quality and meteorological data in time series. Data were fed into the model by using the rolling prediction method which is proven to improve prediction accuracy in our experiments. Lastly, the comparative experiments show that at the city level, RF and ExtraTrees models have better predictive results with lower mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and higher index of agreement (IA) compared to other selected models. For seasonality, level four models all have the best prediction performances in winter time and the worst in summer time, and RF models have the best prediction performance with the IA ranging from 0.93 to 0.98 with an MAE of 5.91 to 11.68 μg/m3. Consequently, the demonstration of how each model performs differently in each city and each season is expected to shed light on environmental policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is an important precursor of atmospheric aerosol. Forecasting urban NO2 concentration is vital for effective control of air pollution. This paper proposes a hybrid deep learning model for predicting daily average NO2 concentrations on the next day, based on atmospheric pollutants, meteorological data, and historical data during 2014 to 2020 in five coastal cities of Shandong peninsula, northern China. A random Forest (RF) algorithm was used to select input variables to reduce data dimensionality trained by the sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) the model and describe how the Seq2Seq model understands each predictor variable. The hybrid model combining an RF with Seq2Seq network (RF-S2S) was evaluated and achieved a Pearson's correlation coefficient of 0.93, a Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient (NS) of 0.79, a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 5.85 µg/m3, a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 4.50 µg/m3, and a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 20.86%. Feature selection by an RF model improves the performance of the Seq2Seq model, reducing errors by 19.7% (RMSE), 20.3% (MAE), and 29.3% (MAPE), respectively. Carbon monoxide (CO) and PM10 are two common, important features influencing the prediction of NO2 concentrations in coastal areas of northern China. The results of RF-S2S models can capture general trends and disruptions more accurately than can long-short term memory (LSTM) models with and without feature selection. The decreasing tendency of NO2 from 2014 to 2020 illustrated by the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is one important obstacle to improving the RF-S2S prediction accuracy. An EMD-based RF-S2S model could help to perform the short-term forecast of NO2 concentrations efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methane (CH4) is the second-largest greenhouse gas emitted by human activity and natural sources after carbon dioxide (CO2). Its relatively short lifetime in the atmosphere (about 12 years) means that we can mitigate the human impacts of climate change in a relatively short period of time by reducing CH4 emissions. The creation of CH4 emissions management policies can be based on the distribution maps of surface CH4 concentration that are in large-scale and at high-resolution. The estimate of CH4 emissions with broad coverage are provided by currently extensively used satellite data supplemented with data from model simulations. However, it is at low spatial resolution. In this paper, through the combination of atmospheric CH4 observations from the TROPOMI sensor and wind data from the ECMWF global reanalysis, a straightforward divergence method is proposed to estimate the surface CH4 emissions in China from March 2019 to September 2022 at a resolution of 7 km × 7 km. This method was compared with the average annual CH4 emissions of Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv7.0), and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) is 2.53 kg/km2/h and within error envelop (EE) is 72.93%, which represents the proportion of reliable values under certain uncertain conditions. We estimated that the average annual CH4 emissions in China from 2019 to 2022 is 81 Tg, with the lowest emissions in 2021 (75 Tg) due to the impact of COVID-19. In 2021, the largest anthropogenic emissions in China are from agriculture, energy activities and livestock, accounting for 28% (20.8 Tg), 25% (18.9 Tg) and 19% (13.9 Tg) of total emissions, respectively, while wetlands, as the largest natural source, produce 14% (10.5 Tg) of CH4 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate prediction of PM2.5 concentration is one of the key tasks of air pollution assessment, early warning, and treatment. In this paper, four monitoring sites were arranged in Jiangbei New District of Nanjing City, China. The environmental parameters such as PM2.5/PM10 concentration, temperature, and humidity were monitored from January to February 2020. A gated recurrent unit (GRU) network based on the PM2.5 concentration prediction model was established to predict PM2.5 concentration. The mean relative error (MRE), root mean square error (RMSE), and Pearson correlation coefficient were selected as the evaluation criteria for the accuracy of the GRU model. The data set was divided into a training set, a test set and a validation set at a ratio of 7:2:1, and the GRU model was used to predict the hourly value of PM2.5 concentration in the next week. The prediction results show that the Pearson correlation coefficients between the predicted values and the monitored values of the four monitoring sites have reached more than 0.9, reflecting a strong correlation. The relative average errors are around 10%. The GRU model prediction of NJAU (Nanjing Agricultural University)-Pukou Campus Site is the most accurate, and the correlation coefficient, MRE, and RMSE are 0.970, 7.85%, and 9.6049, respectively, reflecting the good prediction performance of the model. Therefore, this research supports the prediction of air quality in different cities and regions, so people can take protective measures in advance and reduce the damage caused by air pollution to human bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite-based precipitation products (SPPs) provide valuable precipitation information for various applications. Their performance, however, varies significantly from region to region due to various data sources and production processes. This paper aims to evaluate four selected SPPs (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR), Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP), Gauge-adjusted Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMAP-gauge), and Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM)) over mainland China from 2016 to 2019. Both conventional statistical indicators (e.g., correlation coefficients (CC), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), relative bias (RB), and Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE)) and categorical indicators (probability of detection (POD), probability of true detection (POTD), false-alarm rate (FAR), and critical success index (CSI)) are used for quantitative analysis. The results show that: (1) GSMAP-gauge and GPM perform best in reproducing the spatial distribution pattern of precipitation over mainland China, whereas SPPs generally underestimate summer precipitation with a high frequency of no-rain cases. (2) MSWEP has the best capability for recording precipitation events, although some parts of northern China exhibit abnormal overestimations for winter precipitation. (3) All SPPs, especially the PERSIANN-CDR, significantly underestimate the precipitation in the mountainous areas of southwestern China. (4) The GSMAP-gauge and GPM outperformed the other two of the four SPPs, in terms of the probability density function of daily precipitation for cases (PDFc) and the probability density function of daily precipitation for volume (PDFv). Generally, PERSIANN-CDR shows the poorest performance when compared to the other three products. The product's algorithm for estimating heavy precipitation and mountainous precipitation needs further improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Odor measurement is a crucial element of odor management and regulation. This paper introduced a collaborative implementation of interlaboratory evaluation of olfactometry between Japan and China. An international comparison of olfactometry using the triangular odor bag method was carried out for the first time between Japan and China in 2018. A total of 134 olfactometry laboratories (130 Japanese and 4 Chinese) participated in the test, and the odor index of the test odorant (dimethyl disulfide with a concentration of 10.7 ppm) was measured three times at each laboratory. In the interlaboratory evaluation, a reference value and repeatability and reproducibility standard deviations were determined on the basis of measurement results of 13 'excellent qualified laboratories' designated by the Japan Association on Odor Environment. Evaluation results of trueness and precision of the 133 laboratories that conducted duplicate or triplicate measurements showed that 110 (108 Japanese and 2 Chinese) and 104 (102 Japanese and 2 Chinese) laboratories (82.7% and 78.2%) conformed to the criterion of trueness and precision, respectively, and 87 (86 Japanese and 1 Chinese) laboratories (65.4%) conformed to both. Based on the meaningful experiences in 2018, a continuous international collaboration between Japan and China in the field of olfactometry should be implemented for the improvement of the quality of olfactometry laboratories and the reliability of odor measurement in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sunshine duration is an important indicator of the amount of solar radiation received in a region and an important input parameter for the study of atmospheric energy balance, climate change, ecosystem evolution, and social sustainability. Currently, extrapolation and interpolation of data from meteorological stations are the most common methods used to calculate sunshine duration on a regional scale. However, it is difficult to obtain high precision sunshine duration in areas lacking ground observation or where sunshine duration is highly heterogeneous on the ground. In this paper, a new method is proposed to estimate sunshine duration with hourly total cloud amount (CTA) data from sunrise to sunset derived from the Fengyun-2G geostationary meteorological satellite (FY-2G). This method constructs a new index known as daytime mean total cloud coverage amount and provides quadratic equations relating daytime mean total cloud coverage amount to relative sunshine duration in different seasons. The method was validated with ground observation data for 2016 from 18 meteorological stations in the Three-River Headwaters Region of Qinghai Province, China. For individual stations, the coefficient of determination (R2) between estimated and measured sunshine was at least 0.894, the RMSE (root mean square error) was 0.977 h/day or less, the MAE (mean absolute error) was 0.824 h/day or less, the RE (relative error) was 0.150 or lower, and the value of d was 0.963 or greater, which validated that the proposed method can effectively predict daily sunshine duration. These equations can also provide higher precision estimates of regional-scale sunshine duration. This was demonstrated by comparing, for the entire study region, the spatial distribution of sunshine duration estimated from season-based equations with results from three different interpolation methods based on ground observations. Overall, the study confirms that total cloud amount measures from a geostationary satellite can be used to successfully estimate sunshine duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud droplet size distribution (CDSD) is a critical characteristic for a number of processes related to clouds, considering that cloud droplets are formed in different sizes above the cloud-base. This paper analyzes the in-situ aircraft measurements of CDSDs and aerosol concentration ( N a ) performed in stratiform clouds in Hebei, China, in 2015 to reveal the characteristics of cloud spectral width, commonly known as relative dispersion (ε , ratio of standard deviation (σ) to mean radius (r) of the CDSD). A new algorithm is developed to calculate the contributions of droplets of different sizes to ε. It is found that small droplets with the size range of 1 to 5.5 μm and medium droplets with the size range of 5.5 to 10 μm are the major contributors to ε, and the medium droplets generally dominate the change of ε. The variation of ε with N a can be well explained by comparing the normalized changes of σ and r ( k σ / σ and k r / r ), rather than k σ and k r only ( k σ is Δσ/Δ N a and k r is Δr/Δ N a ). From the perspective of external factors affecting ε change, the effects of N a and condensation are examined. It is found that ε increases initially and decreases afterward as N a increases, and "condensational broadening" occurs up to 1 km above cloud-base, potentially providing observational evidence for recent numerical simulations in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]