Spatial distributions of aerosol loadings and depositions in East Asia during the year 2010

- Aerosol Modeling System simulates well all kinds of aerosols in the atmosphere.
- Aerosols in Asia are a mixture of the Asian dust (AD) and the anthropogenic aerosol.
- Annual mean surface AD concentration exceeds 200 μg m−3 in the source region.
- Annual total deposition of aerosols in the Asian domain is about 4.9 × 108 t.
- Annual total dry deposition (wet deposition) is about 3.2 × 108 t (1.7 × 108 t).

Aerosol Modeling System (AMS) that is consisted of the Asian Dust Aerosol Model2 (ADAM2) and the Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system has been employed to document the geographical distributions of both the annual averaged Asian dust aerosol and the anthropogenic aerosols concentrations and their total depositions in the East Asia region for the year 2010. It is found that AMS simulates quite well the monitored PM10 concentration with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 9.2 μg m−3 and a normalized mean square error (NMSE) of 5.5% in South Korea and the RMSE of less than 33 μg m−3 with a NMSE of less than 7.8% at the monitoring sites in China. The annual mean surface (column integrated) aerosol concentrations in the East Asia region affect in a wide region as a complex mixture of the Asian dust (AD) aerosol and the anthropogenic aerosol (AA), more predominated by the AD aerosol in the Asian dust source region of northern China and Mongolia with the annual mean (column integrated) PM10 concentration of more than 200 μg m−3 (350 mg m−2). Whereas AA is dominated in the high pollutant emission regions of southern and eastern China and northern India with the annual mean surface (column integrated) concentration of more than 110 μg m−3 (140 mg m−2) in eastern China. On the other hand the mixed aerosols (AD + AA) are dominated in the downwind regions of the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the Korean peninsula, Japan, and the Northwest Pacific Ocean. It is also found that the annual total deposition of aerosols in the model domain is 4.9 × 108 t (3.7 × 108 t by AD aerosol and 1.2 × 108 t by AA), of which 66% (3.2 × 108 t) is found to be contributed by the dry deposition (3.1 × 108 t by AD aerosol and 1.3 × 107 t by AA) and 34% (1.7 × 108 t) by the wet deposition (1.0 × 108 t by AA and 6.6 × 107 t by AD aerosol), suggesting significant impacts of aerosols on environment and the terrestrial and marine eco-systems in East Asia.