Urban dust in the Guanzhong Basin of China, part I: A regional distribution of dust sources retrieved using satellite data

Xin Long; Nan Li; Xuexi Tie; Junji Cao; Shuyu Zhao; Rujin Huang; Mudan Zhao; Guohui Li; Tian Feng

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.10.063

Urban dust in the Guanzhong Basin of China, part I: A regional distribution of dust sources retrieved using satellite data

Sci Total Environ. 2016 Jan 15:541:1603-1613. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.10.063. Epub 2015 Oct 27.

Authors

Xin Long¹, Nan Li², Xuexi Tie³, Junji Cao⁴, Shuyu Zhao⁵, Rujin Huang⁶, Mudan Zhao⁷, Guohui Li⁵, Tian Feng⁵

Affiliations

¹ 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.
² 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.
³ 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.
⁴ 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.
⁵ Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, SKLLQG, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China.
⁶ 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.
⁷ College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Northwest University, Xian 710127, China.

PMID: 26518756
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.10.063

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.

Keywords: Regional construction dust; Satellite data; Urban dust source; WRF-Dust model.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't