Black Carbon Emission Reduction Due to COVID‐19 Lockdown in China
- Author(s)
- Mengwei Jia, Nikolaos Evangeliou, Sabine Eckhardt, Xin Huang, Jian Gao, Aijun Ding, Andreas Stohl
- 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.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Meteorology and Geophysics
- External organisation(s)
- Nanjing University, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Norwegian Institute for Air Research
- Journal
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Volume
- 48
- No. of pages
- 10
- ISSN
- 0094-8276
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093243
- Publication date
- 04-2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 105206 Meteorology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geophysics, General Earth and Planetary Sciences
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/11e29d1f-51c7-4fc4-829a-a7df3a30ac7d