Assessment of air quality benefits from national air pollution control policies in China. Part II: Evaluation of air quality predictions and air quality benefits assessment

Following the meteorological evaluation in Part I, this Part II paper presents the statistical evaluation of air quality predictions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA)’s Community Multi-Scale Air Quality (Models-3/CMAQ) model for the four simulated months in the base year 2005. The surface predictions were evaluated using the Air Pollution Index (API) data published by the China Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) for 31 capital cities and daily fine particulate matter (PM2.5, particles with aerodiameter less than or equal to 2.5 μm) observations of an individual site in Tsinghua University (THU). To overcome the shortage in surface observations, satellite data are used to assess the column predictions including tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) column abundance and aerosol optical depth (AOD). The result shows that CMAQ gives reasonably good predictions for the air quality. r quality improvement that would result from the targeted sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emission controls in China were assessed for the objective year 2010. The results show that the emission controls can lead to significant air quality benefits. SO2 concentrations in highly polluted areas of East China in 2010 are estimated to be decreased by 30–60% compared to the levels in the 2010 Business-As-Usual (BAU) case. The annual PM2.5 can also decline by 3–15 μg m−3 (4–25%) due to the lower SO2 and sulfate concentrations. If similar controls are implemented for NOx emissions, NOx concentrations are estimated to decrease by 30–60% as compared with the 2010 BAU scenario. The annual mean PM2.5 concentrations will also decline by 2–14 μg m−3 (3–12%). In addition, the number of ozone (O3) non-attainment areas in the northern China is projected to be much lower, with the maximum 1-h average O3 concentrations in the summer reduced by 8–30 ppb.