Long-range transport impacts on surface aerosol concentrations and the contributions to haze events in China: an HTAP2 multi-model study

Haze has been severely affecting the densely populated areas in China recently. While many of the efforts have been devoted to investigating the impact of local anthropogenic emission, limited attention has been paid to the contribution from long-range transport. In this study, we apply simulations from six participating models supplied through the Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution phase 2 (HTAP2) exercise to investigate the long-range transport impact of Europe (EUR) and Russia–Belarus–Ukraine (RBU) on the surface air quality in eastern Asia (EAS), with special focus on their contributions during the haze episodes in China. The impact of 20% anthropogenic emission perturbation from the source region is extrapolated by a factor of 5 to estimate the full impact. We find that the full impacts from EUR and RBU are 0.99µg m−3 (3.1%) and 1.32µg m−3 (4.1%) during haze episodes, while the annual averaged full impacts are only 0.35µg m-3 (1.7%) and 0.53µg m-3 (2.6%). By estimating the aerosol response within and above the planetary boundary layer (PBL), we find that long-range transport from EUR within the PBL contributes to 22-38% of the total column density of aerosol response in EAS. Comparison with the HTAP phase 1 (HTAP1) assessment reveals that from 2000 to 2010, the long-range transport from Europe to eastern Asia has decreased significantly by a factor of 2-10 for surface aerosol mass concentration due to the simultaneous emission reduction in source regions and emission increase in the receptor region. We also find the long-range transport from the Europe and RBU regions increases the number of haze events in China by 0.15% and 0.11%, and the North China Plain and southeastern China has 1-3 extra haze days ( < 3%). This study is the first investigation into the contribution of long-range transport to haze in China with multi-model experiments.