title: Urban dust in the Guanzhong Basin of China, part I: A regional distribution of dust sources retrieved using satellite data.
abstract: Urban dust pollution has been becoming an outstanding environmental problem due to rapid urbanization in China. However, it is very difficult to construct an urban dust inventory, owing to its small horizontal scale and strong temporal/spatial variability. With the analysis of visual interpretation, maximum likelihood classification, extrapolation and spatial overlaying, we quantified dust source distributions of urban constructions, barrens and croplands in the Guanzhong Basin using various satellite data, including VHR (0.5m), Lansat-8 OLI (30 m) and MCD12Q1 (500 m). The croplands were the dominant dust sources, accounting for 40% (17,913 km(2)) of the study area in summer and 36% (17,913 km(2)) in winter, followed by barrens, accounting for 5% in summer and 10% in winter. Moreover, the total constructions were 126 km(2), including 84% of active and 16% inactive. In addition, 59% of the constructions aggregated on the only megacity of the study area, Xi'an. With high accuracy exceeding 88%, the proposed satellite-data based method is feasible and valuable to quantify distributions of dust sources. This study provides a new perspective to evaluate regional urban dust, which is seldom quantified and reported. In a companied paper (Part-2 of the study), the detailed distribution of the urban dust sources is applied in a dynamical/aerosol model (WRF-Dust) to assess the effect of dust sources on aerosol pollution.
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; Department of Atmospheric Science, 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; 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.
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.
authors.forename: Shuyu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhao
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 (PSI), 5232 Villigen, Switzerland. Electronic address: rujin.huang@ieecas.cn.
authors.forename: Rujin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Northwest University, Xian 710127, China.
authors.forename: Mudan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhao
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
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China.
authors.forename: Tian
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Feng
keywords: Regional construction dust; Satellite data; Urban dust source; WRF-Dust model