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Large‐scale transport of pollution aerosol over the east coast of Asia
Author(s) -
Uematsu Mitsuo,
Sugita Takafumi,
Anikiev Vladimir V.,
Medvedev Alexander N.
Publication year - 1992
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 - 10.1029/92gl02639
Subject(s) - sulfate , aerosol , nitrate , sea salt , environmental science , pollution , east asia , atmospheric sciences , geography , china , meteorology , geology , chemistry , biology , ecology , organic chemistry , archaeology
Eastern Asia contains many large pollution sources whose emissions can be transported over large areas of North Pacific. In order to characterize this transport, we collected a sixty‐day series of daily aerosol samples concurrently from Sapporo, Japan and Vladivostok, CIS from April to May, 1991. These were analyzed for non‐sea‐salt (nss) sulfate and nitrate. The arithmetic mean concentrations of nss‐sulfate (4.66 ± 2.68 μg m −3 ) and nitrate (2.58 ± 1.62 μg m −3 ) in Vladivostok were 70% and 40% higher than the corresponding concentrations of nss‐sulfate (2.69 ± 2.06 μg m −3 ) and nitrate (1.86 ± 1.42 μg m −3 ) in Sapporo. Several episodic peaks of nss‐sulfate and nitrate in Vladivostok corresponded to the peaks observed in Sapporo, which is located approximately 700 km east of Vladivostok. About 40% and 25% of the variance in the nss‐sulfate and nitrate concentrations at the two sites could be explained by the large‐scale transport of substances under the strong winds from the west and southwest This suggests that the high concentrations are associated with strong regional sources located to windward of these cities and that the concentrations that we measured are probably representative of a large area of the coastal western North Pacific Ocean.