Economic shutdown to fight coronavirus provides researchers from Caltech and the Chinese Academy of Sciences unique opportunity to study impact of reduced emissions and the complex interplay that produces “hazy” days in northern China
The viral before-and-after images of improved air quality around the world resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown may not hold true for all parts of the world. According to a new study published on June 17 in the journal Science, although there was a dramatic reduction in pollution emission during the lockdown, other factors involving complex atmospheric chemistry and meteorological variations actually led to a deterioration in air quality in northern China during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Researchers from Caltech and the Chinese Academy of Sciences reviewed satellite and ground-based observations of the region and conducted state-of-the-science atmospheric model simulations. They focused on the roughly three weeks between January 23 to February 13 when China locked down its cities in an effort to slow the spread of infection.
“The halted human activities during the COVID-19 pandemic in China provided us a unique experiment to assess the efficiency of air-pollution mitigation,” says Yuan Wang, a research scientist at Caltech and the corresponding author of the Science paper.