Black Carbon Emission Reduction Due to COVID‐19 Lockdown in China

Mengwei Jia, Nikolaos Evangeliou, Sabine Eckhardt, Xin Huang, Jian Gao, Aijun Ding, Andreas Stohl

Publications: Contribution to journalArticlePeer Reviewed

Abstract

During the Lunar New Year Holiday of 2020, China implemented an unprecedented lockdown to fight the COVID‐19 outbreak, which strongly affected the anthropogenic emissions. We utilized elemental carbon observations (equivalent to black carbon, BC) from 42 sites and performed inverse modeling to determine the impact of the lockdown on the weekly BC emissions and quantify the effect of the stagnant conditions on BC observations in densely populated eastern and northern China. BC emissions declined 70% (eastern China) and 48% (northern China) compared to the first half of January. In northern China, under the stagnant conditions of the first week of the lockdown, the observed BC concentrations rose unexpectedly (29%) even though the BC emissions fell. The emissions declined substantially thereafter until a week after the lockdown ended. On the contrary, in eastern China, BC emissions dropped sharply in the first week and recovered synchronously with the end of the lockdown.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2021GL093243
Number of pages10
JournalGeophysical Research Letters
Volume48
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Apr 2021

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

  • 105206 Meteorology

Keywords

  • ANTHROPOGENIC EMISSIONS
  • ASSOCIATIONS
  • BC emission
  • BOUNDARY-LAYER
  • COVID-19
  • EAST-ASIA
  • ELEMENTAL CARBON
  • FINE-PARTICLE
  • LATITUDES
  • PARTICLE DISPERSION MODEL
  • PARTICULATE MATTER
  • TRANSPORT
  • eastern China
  • inverse modeling
  • northern China
  • stagnant conditions

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