title: Urban dust in the Guanzhong basin of China, part II: A case study of urban dust pollution using the WRF-Dust model.
abstract: We developed a regional dust dynamical model (WRF-Dust) to simulate surface dust concentrations in the Guanzhong (GZ) basin of China during two typical dust cases (19th Aug. and 26th Nov., 2013), and compared model results with the surface measurements at 17 urban and rural sites. The important improvement of the model is to employ multiple high-resolution (0.5-500 m) remote sensing data to construct dust sources. The new data include the geographic information of constructions, croplands, and barrens over the GZ basin in summer and winter of 2013. For the first time, detailed construction dust emissions have been introduced in a regional dust model in large cities of China. Our results show that by including the detailed dust sources, model performance at simulating dust pollutions in the GZ basin is significantly improved. For example, the simulated dust concentration average for the 17 sites increases from 28 μg m(-3) to 59 μg m(-3), closing to the measured concentration of 66 μg m(-3). In addition, the correlation coefficient (r) between the calculated and measured dust concentrations is also improved from 0.17 to 0.57, suggesting that our model better presents the spatial variation. Further analysis shows that urban construction activities are the crucial source in controlling urban dust pollutions. It should be considered by policy makers for mitigating particulate air pollution in many Chinese cities.
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China; Department of Atmospheric Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Nan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Long
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China; National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80303, USA. Electronic address: xxtie@ucar.edu.
authors.forename: Xuexi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tie
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China; Institute of Global Environmental Change, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China. Electronic address: jjcao@ieecas.cn.
authors.forename: Junji
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China; Laboratory of Atmospheric Chemistry, Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen 5232, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Rujin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China.
authors.forename: Rong
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China; Institute of Global Environmental Change, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
authors.forename: Tian
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China.
authors.forename: Suixin
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China.
authors.forename: Guohui
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Li
keywords: Construction dust; Dust pollution; The Guanzhong basin; WRF-Dust