Ozone photochemical pollution is currently a major atmospheric environmental concern in China during warm seasons, and regional multi-day heavy ozone pollution often occurs in China's coastal city clusters before the landfall of Northwest Pacific typhoons. Recently, Science Advances published a collaborative research paper titled Typhoon-boosted biogenic emission aggravates cross-regional ozone pollution in China by Professor Aijun Ding's team.
The study analyzed multi-year typhoon tracks and ozone observation data and found that typhoon tracks crossing the Taiwan Strait northward through the Western Pacific low latitudes would lead to regional ozone pollution in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta successively. Using coupled meteorology-biogenic source-chemistry simulations, it was found that conditions such as high temperatures and strong radiation in typhoon periphery significantly exacerbated the emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) from forests in southern China, which could enhance ozone pollution in two maincity clusters through interactions with anthropogenic sources; and with the approach and landfall of typhoons, there is a significant upstream and downstream transport of ozone and its precursors between the two main city clusters.
FIG. 1. Typhoon-boosted interactions between anthropogenic and biogenic sources.
FIG. 2. Conceptual scheme illustrating how typhoon aggravates cross-regional ozone pollution in eastern China and quantitative assessment of key factors therein.
In China, the current understanding of ozone pollution mechanisms and control measures mainly focus on anthropogenic emissions, with relatively little consideration of the effects of natural vegetation emissions and cross-regional transport. This study provides scientific evidence for the key role of natural sources in ozone pollution in city clusters, helps the understanding of the complexity of regional ozone pollution prevention and control and the importance of scientific support in it, and provides new insights into the interactions between extreme weather processes and atmospheric chemistry impacted by climate change.
Nan Wang, a PhD student from the School of Atmospheric Sciences, is the first author of this paper. Professor Aijun Ding and associate Professor Xin Huang are the co-corresponding authors. Academician Zhemin Tan is a co-author, and the Institute of Tropical and Marine Meteorology/Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Regional Numerical Weather Prediction, China Meteorological Administration is a collaborator. This work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41725020, and 41922038) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (DLTD2107).
Article link:
Wang, N., Huang, X.*, Xu, J., Wang, T., Tan, Z.-M., Ding, A*, Typhoon-boosted biogenic emission aggravates cross-regional ozone pollution in China, Science Advances, 8, 2, doi:10.1126/sciadv.abl6166, 2022.