Continuous and comprehensive atmospheric observations in Beijing:a station to understand the complex urban atmospheric environment

Due to profound impact on climate and human health,air quality has attracted attention from all levels of the civil society.The key step in the provision of required tools for the society to tackle the complex air quality problem is to characterize it in a comprehensive manner with a long-term perspective.Here,we describe a continuous and comprehensive observation station and its accompanying state-ofthe-art instrumentation that was established to investigate the complex urban atmospheric environment in a rapidly developing Chinese Megacity.The station,located in downtown Beijing,aims to study air quality by identifying the major atmospheric pollutants and key processes determining their formation and loss mechanisms.A few hundreds of parameters are continuously measured with the state-of-the-art instruments,including trace gas concentrations,aerosol particle size distributions,and mass concentrations,covering aerosol particle chemical composition from molecules to micrometer-sized aerosol particles.This produced long-term,comprehensive big data with around 1�10^(11)bytes per year.In this paper,we provide an overview on the facilities of the station,the instrumentation used,the workflow of continuous observations and examples of results from 2018 to 2019 and a basis for establishing a modern long-term,comprehensive atmospheric urban observation station in other megacities.

Optical and Radiative Properties of Aerosols during a Severe Haze Episode over the North China Plain in December 2016

The optical and radiative properties of aerosols during a severe haze episode from 15 to 22 December 2016 over Beijing, Shijiazhuang, and Jiaozuo in the North China Plain were analyzed based on the ground-based and satellite data, meteorological observations, and atmospheric environmental monitoring data. The aerosol optical depth at 500 nm was 〈 0.30 and increased to 〉 1.4 as the haze pollution developed. The Angstr6m exponent was 〉 0.80 for most of the study period. The daily single-scattering albedo was 〉 0.85 over all of the North China Plain on the most polluted days and was 〉 0.97 on some particular days. The volumes of fine and coarse mode particles during the haze event were approximately 0.05-0.21 and 0.01-0.43 μm^3, respectively-that is, larger than those in the time without haze. The daily absorption aerosol optical depth was about 0.01-0.11 in Beijing, 0.01-0.13 in Shijiazhuang, and 0.01-0.04 in Jiaozuo, and the average absorption Angstrom exponent varied between 0.6 and 2.0. The aerosol radiative forcing at the bottom of the atmosphere varied from -23 to -227, -34 to -199, and -29 to -191 W m^-2 for the whole haze period, while the aerosol radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere varied from -4 to -98, -10 to -51, and -21 to -143 W m^-2 in Beijing, Shijiazhuang, and Jiaozuo, respectively. Satellite observations showed that smoke, polluted dust, and polluted continental components of aerosols may aggravate air pollution during haze episodes. The analysis of the potential source contribution function and concentration-weighted trajectory showed that the contribu- tion from local emissions and pollutants transport from upstream areas were 190-450 and 100-410 btg m-3, respectively.