Combined use of WEPS and Models-3/CMAQ for simulating wind erosion source emission and its environmental impact

The wind erosion source is the greatest contributor of PM10 in Tianjin, China. It is difficult to establish a PM10 emission inventory for the wind erosion source because of the complicated conditions affecting PM10 emissions from wind erosion. In this study, a novel method is developed to establish a PM10 emission inventory for the wind erosion source by using the Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) model with 1 × 1 km spatial resolution. In 2011, the average annual emission of PM10 in Tianjin was 0.373 tons km− 2 (1.113 tons km− 2 in the heating period, 0.237 tons km− 2 in the sand period, and 0.013 tons km− 2 in the non-heating period), and the total PM10 emission was 904,871.6 tons (221,080.7 tons in the heating period, 52,977.8 tons in the sand period, and 1953.2 tons in the non-heating period). After establishing the PM10 emission inventory for the wind erosion source in this manner, the data were input into Model-3/SMOKE. The contribution of the PM10 concentration from the wind erosion source was estimated using the Community Multi-scale Air Quality (Model-3/CMAQ) model and was compared with the monitoring value and the source apportionment results using the chemical mass balance (CMB) method. For this comparison, over the entire year, the R2 was 0.711. More specifically, R2 was 0.664, 0.733, and 0.679 in the heating, non-heating, and sand periods, respectively. Thus, we have obtained a reliable method for estimating the source of PM10 from wind erosion.