Model study on acidifying wet deposition in East Asia during wintertime

A regional air quality model (RAQM) has been developed and applied together with an aerosol model to investigate the states and characteristics of wet deposition in East Asia in December 2001. Model simulation is performed with monthly based emission inventory [Streets, D.G., Bond, T.C., Carmichael, G.R., Fernandes, S.D., Fu, Q., He, D., Klimont, Z., Nelson, S. M., Tsai, N.Y., Wang, M.Q., Woo, J.-H., Yarber, K.F., 2003. An inventory of gaseous and primary emissions in Asia in the year 2000. Journal of Geophysical Research 108(D21), 8809] and meteorological fields derived from MM5. Model results are compared with extensive monitoring data including relevant gaseous species and ions in precipitation. The validation demonstrates that this model system is able to represent most of the major physical and chemical processes involved in acid deposition and reproduces concentrations reasonably well, within a factor of 2 of observations in general. The study shows that the regions with pH less than 4.5 are mainly located in southwestern China, parts of the Yangtze Delta, the Yellow Sea and the Korean peninsula, indicating wide regions of acid precipitation in East Asia in wintertime. Japan islands mainly exhibit pH values of 4.5–5.0, whereas over wide areas of northern China, pH values are relatively high (⩾5.0) due to neutralization by alkaline materials such as calcium-laden particles and ammonia, which are more abundant in northern China than that in southern China. While acid rain over most of China is still characterized by sulfur-induced type, considerable areas of eastern China and the western Pacific Rim are found to be more affected by nitric acid than sulfuric acid in acidification of precipitation, which is supposed to result from a combined effect of variations in photochemistry and emission, suggesting the increasing importance of NOx emission in these regions.