Simultaneous dust and pollutant transport over East Asia: The Tripartite Environment Ministers Meeting March 2014 case study

Abstract

Heavy dust storms that occurred between 13 and 23 March 2014 were selected for analysis as a case study of dust and sand storm events by the Tripartite Environment Ministers Meeting. During this period, two dust and anthropogenic aerosol events were observed and analyzed. The GEOS-Chem chemical transport model, which includes dust-acid uptake processes, successfully reproduced the aerosol variations and explained the Asian-scale dust-pollutant transport processes. Our results confirmed the importance of coarse-mode dust-nitrate as evidence of 'polluted dust' pollution. The model analysis showed that the formation of dust-nitrate occurred over the Yellow Sea and East China Sea before arriving in Japan. We showed that more than 40% of nitrate exists in dust-nitrate when air mass arrived in Japan.