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

Autor(en)
Mengwei Jia, Nikolaos Evangeliou, Sabine Eckhardt, Xin Huang, Jian Gao, Aijun Ding, Andreas Stohl
Abstrakt

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(en)
Institut für Meteorologie und Geophysik
Externe Organisation(en)
Nanjing University, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Norwegian Institute for Air Research
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Band
48
Anzahl der Seiten
10
ISSN
0094-8276
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093243
Publikationsdatum
04-2021
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
105206 Meteorologie
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Geophysics, Allgemeine Erdkunde und Planetologie
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/11e29d1f-51c7-4fc4-829a-a7df3a30ac7d