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Black Carbon Emission Reduction Due to COVID‐19 Lockdown in China
Author(s) -
Jia Mengwei,
Evangeliou Nikolaos,
Eckhardt Sabine,
Huang Xin,
Gao Jian,
Ding Aijun,
Stohl Andreas
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2021gl093243
Subject(s) - china , covid-19 , environmental science , carbon fibers , carbon black , outbreak , greenhouse gas , southern china , geography , physical geography , atmospheric sciences , geology , chemistry , oceanography , archaeology , materials science , pathology , virology , composite number , composite material , biology , natural rubber , medicine , disease , organic chemistry , infectious disease (medical specialty)
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.