The Chinese Spring Festival is one of the most important traditional festivals in China. The peak transport in the Spring Festival season (spring travel rush) provides a unique opportunity for investigating the impact of human activity on air quality in the Chinese megacities. Emission sources are varied and fluctuate greatly before, during and after the Festival. Increased vehicular emissions ...

From 2006 to 2007, the daily concentrations of major inorganic water-soluble constituents, mineral aerosol, organic carbon (OC) and elemental carbon (EC) in ambient PM10 samples were investigated from 16 urban, rural and remote sites in various regions of China, and were compared with global aerosol measurements. A large difference between urban and rural chemical species was found, normally wi...

An Aerodyne Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS) was deployed at the CENICA Supersite, during the Mexico City Metropolitan Area field study (MCMA-2003) from 31 March–4 May 2003 to investigate particle concentrations, sources, and processes. The AMS provides real time information on mass concentration and composition of the non-refractory species in particulate matter less than 1 μm (NR-PM1) with hig...

Chamber studies of glyoxal uptake onto ammonium sulphate aerosol were performed under dark and irradiated conditions to gain further insight into processes controlling glyoxal uptake onto ambient aerosol. Organic fragments from glyoxal dimers and trimers were observed within the aerosol under dark and irradiated conditions. Glyoxal monomers and oligomers were the dominant organic compounds form...

A season-reliant empirical orthogonal function (S-EOF) analysis is applied to seasonal mean precipitation over East Asia for the period of 1979–2004. The first two dominant modes account for 44% of the total interannual variance, corresponding to post-ENSO and ENSO turnabout years, respectively. The first mode indicates that in El Niño decaying summer, an anomalous anticyclone appears over the ...

Measurements of aerosol optical properties (aerosol optical depth, scattering and backscattering coefficients) have been conducted at two groundbased sites in Northern Greece, Ouranoupolis (4023 N, 2357 E, 170 m a.s.l.) and Thessaloniki (4038 N, 2257 E, 80 m a.s.l.), between 1999 and 2002. The frequency distributions of the observed parameters have revealed the presence of individual modes of h...

This paper presents results of an aerosol chemical characterisation experiment conducted on the Island of Jeju, Korea, using a range of techniques for analysing inorganic and organic particle components. Sulphate and ammonium were biased toward the accumulation mode size ranges. Nitrate, sodium, calcium and chloride were found in the larger size ranges and attributed to the collection of modifi...