1. The state of science on severe air pollution episodes: Quantitative and qualitative analysis
- Author
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Frank J. Kelly, Tong Zhu, Aneta Wierzbicka, Tao Wang, Maria de Fátima Andrade, Tao Xue, Claus Nordstrøm, Benjamin J. Mullins, Gavin Pereira, Prashant Kumar, Jianmin Chen, Xavier Querol, Cheol H Jeong, Giorgio Buonanno, Greg J. Evans, Laura Gallardo, Parya Broomandi, Hai Guo, Benjamin Barratt, Celine Ye, Lidia Morawska, Yan Cheng, Ivan Hanigan, Min Hu, Luis Carlos Belalcázar Cerón, Armistead G. Russell, Xiaopu Lyu, Lina Wang, Néstor Yezid Rojas Roa, Nairui Liu, Hao Wang, Mario Gavidia, Helen Thompson, and Mehdi Amouei Torkmahalleh
- Subjects
Pollution ,010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Air pollution ,Climate change ,010501 environmental sciences ,medicine.disease_cause ,01 natural sciences ,Natural (archaeology) ,Pollution episodes ,Meteorology ,Qualitative analysis ,Air Pollution ,medicine ,Severe air pollution events ,Humans ,GE1-350 ,Urban air pollution ,Cities ,Baseline (configuration management) ,Desert dust ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,General Environmental Science ,media_common ,Air Pollutants ,Mitigating air pollutants ,Formation of secondary pollutants ,Pollution emissions ,Environmental sciences ,Environmental science ,Particulate Matter ,Physical geography ,Environmental Monitoring - Abstract
Severe episodic air pollution blankets entire cities and regions and have a profound impact on humans and their activities. We compiled daily fine particle (PM2.5) data from 100 cities in five continents, investigated the trends of number, frequency, and duration of pollution episodes, and compared these with the baseline trend in air pollution. We showed that the factors contributing to these events are complex; however, long-term measures to abate emissions from all anthropogenic sources at all times is also the most efficient way to reduce the occurrence of severe air pollution events. In the short term, accurate forecasting systems of such events based on the meteorological conditions favouring their occurrence, together with effective emergency mitigation of anthropogenic sources, may lessen their magnitude and/or duration. However, there is no clear way of preventing events caused by natural sources affected by climate change, such as wildfires and desert dust outbreaks., The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the: Australia-China Centre on Air Quality Science and Management (ACC-AQSM) to undertake and conduct this study; Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) in Western Australia for access to the data; Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER funds under the project HOUSE (CGL2016-78594-R), and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR 2017 SGR41); Climate and Resilient Research (FONDAP 15110009), and the PAPILA (Prediction of Air Pollution in Latin America and the Caribbean) project (ID: 777544, H2020-EU.1.3.3.); ASAP-Delhi project (An Integrated Study of Air Pollutant Sources in the Delhi National Capital Region) funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council under the grant number NE/P016510/1; Stockholm Air and Noise Analysis at Stockholm City Environmental Department for the provision of the data; National Key R&D Program of China via grant No. 2017YFC0212001; National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) program in Canada for data on PM2.5.
- Published
- 2021