Elsevier

Environmental Pollution

Volume 294, 1 February 2022, 118633
Environmental Pollution

The impact of COVID-19 on urban PM2.5 —taking Hubei Province as an example

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2021.118633Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The improved model LSTM&BP has a good prediction performance (RMSE = 8.3, CV-R2 = 0.8).

  • COVID-19 caused a 26.38% decrease in PM2.5 in Wuhan and a 22.61% decrease in Hubei.

  • Haze pollution in Yichang in winter is not caused by local but air-mass transport.

Abstract

In January 2020, China implemented strict lockdown measures due to the invasion of the new coronavirus, which led to a sharp decline in the contribution of anthropogenic fine particulate matter (PM2.5). The special period of COVID-19, especially in Hubei where the epidemic was the most severe, provides excellent research conditions for studying the contribution of anthropogenic activities to PM2.5 concentrations. We used an optimized deep learning model to predict PM2.5 concentration during the epidemic period in the cities of Hubei Province. The contributions of local anthropogenic activities to PM2.5 pollution were obtained by contrasting the predicted results with actual site observations.

However, a strange phenomenon was revealed that Yichang, a city with low local anthropogenic contribution to PM2.5, was found to have severe haze in winter conflicting with our previous expectations. After further research, we found that an increased conversion of secondary aerosols caused by long-distance transport of pollutant gases from the northern region is the main cause of winter haze pollution in this city. This finding highlights the importance of joint regional prevention and control of air pollution.

Keywords

PM2.5
COVID-19
Anthropogenic activities
Air mass transport
Joint prevention

Cited by (0)

This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Da Chen.

1

These authors contributed equally to this work and should be considered co-first authors.

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