Quantifying the relationship between PM2.5 concentration, visibility and planetary boundary layer height for long-lasting haze and fog-haze mixed events in Beijing

摘要

Air quality and visibility are strongly influenced by aerosol loading, which is driven by meteorological conditions. The quantification of their relationships is critical to understanding the physical and chemical processes and forecasting of the polluted events. We investigated and quantified the relationship between PM2.5 (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter is 2.5 mu m and less) mass concentration, visibility and planetary boundary layer (PBL) height in this study based on the data obtained from four long-lasting haze events and seven fog-haze mixed events from January 2014 to March 2015 in Beijing. The statistical results show that there was a negative exponential function between the visibility and the PM2.5 mass concentration for both haze and fog-haze mixed events (with the same R-2 of 0.80). However, the fog-haze events caused a more obvious decrease of visibility than that for haze events due to the formation of fog droplets that could induce higher light extinction. The PM2.5 concentration had an inversely linear correlation with PBL height for haze events and a negative exponential correlation for fog-haze mixed events, indicating that the PM2.5 concentration is more sensitive to PBL height in fog-haze mixed events. The visibility had positively linear correlation with the PBL height with an R-2 of 0.35 in haze events and positive exponential correlation with an R-2 of 0.56 in fog-haze mixed events. We also investigated the physical mechanism responsible for these relationships between visibility, PM2.5 concentration and PBL height through typical haze and fog-haze mixed event and found that a double inversion layer formed in both typical events and played critical roles in maintaining and enhancing the long-lasting polluted events. The variations of the double inversion layers were closely associated with the processes of long-wave radiation cooling in the nighttime and short-wave solar radiation reduction in the daytime. The upper-level stable