Interactions of Atmospheric Chemistry and Atmospheric Boundary Layer: From Megacity to Gigacity

The Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL), which influences the dispersion of air pollution and the exchange of heat, water vapour and chemical species between the atmosphere and the surface, plays a very important role in air quality, weather and climate. The diurnal evolution of the PBL is driven by incoming solar radiation, which controls surface fluxes and vertical thermal dynamics. Thus, radiatively important atmospheric chemical species, such as anthropogenic or natural aerosols, which are primarily emitted or secondarily formed from precursors emitted from the surface and further diluted within the PBL, should have strong interactions with the PBL meteorology. This presentation will provide observational and modelling evidence on the interactions between atmospheric chemistry and the atmospheric boundary layer and their impacts on air quality in megacities (Ding et al., 2016) and transboundary air pollution transport between city clusters in the gigacity region of eastern China (Huang et al., 2020), and will present some recent results and insights from intensive field campaigns of chemical and physical parameters and their vertical profiles in eastern China based on a super-tethered airship platform. This presentation will also explore the impact of these interactions on wildfire/agricultural straw burning extreme events in different climate regimes, such as eastern China and the Indo-China peninsula in monsoon Asia, and the west coast of the United States with Mediterranean climate (Ding et al., 2013; Ding et al., 2021; Huang et al., 2023), and discuss the potential implications for chemical weather prediction and climate studies (Huang and Ding, 2021).

References

Ding, A. et al., Intense atmospheric pollution modifies weather: a case of mixed biomass burning with fossil fuel combustion pollution in eastern China, Chem. Phys., 13, 10545-10554, 2013.

Ding, A. et al., Enhanced haze pollution by black carbon in megacities in China, Res. Lett., 43, 2873-2879, 2016.

Ding, K. et al., Aerosol-boundary-layer-monsoon interactions amplify semi-direct effect of biomass smoke on low cloud formation in Southeast Asia, Nature Commun. 12, 6416, 2021.

Huang, X., Ding, Aerosol as a critical factor causing forecast biases of air temperature in global numerical weather prediction models, Science Bulletin, 66(18), 1917-1924, 2021.

Huang, X. et al., Amplified transboundary transport of haze by aerosol–boundary layer interaction in China, Nature Geoscience, 13, 428-434, 2020.

Huang, X. et al., Smoke-weather interaction affects extreme wildfires in diverse coastal regions, Science, 379, 457-461, 2023.