An Integrated Study of AIR Pollution PROcesses in Beijing (AIRPRO)

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Air pollution is well established as having major negative impacts on human well-being, vegetation and general quality of life. Whilst the exact biological pathways and mechanisms for health impacts remain to be established, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that months to many years of life expectancy can be lost through exposure to air pollution outside. Those negative impacts are currently disproportionately experienced by those in living the world's largest cities and in rapidly developing economies.The basic causes of air pollution are understood; the combustion of fossil fuels for electricity, transport, cooking and heating, emissions from agriculture, from resource extraction, dust and so on, all play a part. Over the past two centuries economic expansion has always been closely tied to transition periods of increased air pollution and negative social and health outcomes. A key global challenge for the 21st century is to create a framework - scientific, regulatory, and technological - which enables economic development, with increases in individual prosperity and quality of life, without damaging air pollution as a side effect.Many of the processes associated with air pollution are non-linear in nature however, and the extremely complex composition of air, as both gases and particles, can make it very difficult to establish direct cause-and-effect. Pollutants often interact with one another in unexpected ways that can create negative unintended consequences from superficially reasonable policy interventions. This is a key area where scientific understanding remains incomplete. The inability to fully describe the chemistry and physics of the urban atmosphere limits society's ability to create effective solutions that work, and that do not conflict with wider developmental and economic goals. This project tackles some of the key uncertainties that remain in urban air processes, including how polluting chemicals are transformed or oxidised in the atmosphere, how gases and particles interact, how pollution is dispersed by weather, how remote emissions from outside the city impacts on urban populations and how the presence of pollution itself may affect feedback and alter on meteorology in cities. The project focuses its study on three key types of harmful air pollution: particulate matter (referred to as PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone O3. The project is a collaboration between ten UK Universities, three leading Chinese research institutes, all part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University and three UK partner research organisations (CERC, NPL, Met Office). The project centre-piece are two periods of intensive observations in the centre of Beijing, in the contrasting atmospheric conditions of winter and summer. The experiments will make measurements at the surface, and in the vertical using a unique 1000ft meteorological tower. These experiments will generate a complex and multiparameter dataset that can challenge state of the art computer models of urban pollution. By challenging models with detailed data, their capabilities can be assessed and their weaknesses and failings identified, and then targeted for improvement. This is vital since the pathway to achieving better air quality is through policy that is underpinned by scientific understanding, and in air pollution science, that understanding is encapsulated in these computer models. The project will use state of the art models from the UK and from China, and develop methods to generate very high spatial resolution estimates of pollution at the surface, a type of data that is essential when studying the health effects of pollution, or evaluating how successful a future policy might be.