Every week, we select a recently published Open Access article to feature. This week’s article is from Environmetrics and studies air pollution in Beijing, China during 2014–2017 to identify where air pollutants easily accumulate.

The article’s abstract is given below, with the full article available to read here. 

Zhang, Y., Chen, S. X., & Bao, L. (2023). Air pollution estimation under air stagnation—A case study of Beijing. Environmetrics, e2819. https://doi.org/10.1002/env.2819

Air pollution continues to be a major environmental concern in China. The wind-driven transmission poses difficulties in understanding the air pollution patterns at the local level. The main objective of this study is to offer a straightforward approach for investigating the temporal trends and meteorological effects on the air pollutant concentrations during the generation process without being confounded by the complex wind-driven transmission effect. We focus on the hourly data of the three most common air pollutants: PM2.5, NO2, and CO under air stagnation in Beijing, China, during 2014–2017. We find that the local pollution levels under air stagnation in Beijing have decreased over the years; winter is the severest month of the year; Sunday is the clearest day of the week. Our model also interpolates the air pollutant concentrations at sites without monitoring stations and provides a map of air pollution concentrations under air stagnation. The results could be used to identify locations where air pollutants easily accumulate.