Assessment of the Impact of the East Asian Summer Monsoon on the Air Quality over China from Space
Hao, Nan¹; Ding, Aijun²; Valks, Pieter¹; Safieddine, Sarah³; Clerbaux, Cathy³; Trautmann, Thomas^1
1Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Earth Observation Center, Remote Sensing Technology Institute, GERMANY; ²Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, Nanjing University, CHINA; ³LATMOS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, FRANCE

Air pollution is one of the most important environmental problems in developing Asian countries like China. Due to huge consumption of fossil fuels and rapid increase of traffic emissions in the past decades, many regions in China have been experiencing heavy air pollution. In this region, studies showed that the East Asian monsoon plays a significant role in characterizing the temporal variation and spatial patterns of air pollution, since monsoon is a major atmospheric system affecting air mass transport, convection, and precipitation.

Publicly available in situ observations cannot provide sufficient spatial coverage and high consistence in data quality for a long-term period. Therefore, knowledge gaps still exist in the understanding of Asian monsoon impact on the air quality in China under the background of global climate change. Satellite retrievals with high spatial coverage and high consistence for a long period can well document the change of air pollution with monsoon.

We apply multi-platform satellite observations by the GOME, SCIAMACHY, GOME-2, IASI, GOMOS, MIPAS and MOPITT instruments to analyze tropospheric ozone and CO, precursors of ozone (NOx, HCHO and CH4) and other related trace gases over China. The potential of using the current generation of satellite instruments to monitor air quality changes caused by the East Asian monsoon circulation will be presented. Preliminary comparison results between satellite measurement and limited but valuable ground-based and aircraft measurements will also be showed.