The relationship between atmospheric SO2 column density and land use in Zhejiang, China

SO₂ is one of the main atmospheric pollution components, and usually used as an indicator to monitor the environmental pollution. The spatio-temporal of SO₂ in urban aera provides critical information on the air quality controlling. Being the developed district of China, Zhejiang Province is a typical region suffered from air pollutions as results of human activities. In this paper, OMI SO₂ column remotely sensed data from 2005.1 to 2008.12 and the land use mapping using MODIS-EVI data, as well as to combine with SO₂ ground measured data are get together, and serve for analyzing the relationship between SO₂ column density and the regional land use change of Zhejiang Province. The results showed that there was a significant correlation between SO₂ column density and the SO₂ ground observation data (R² = 0.793). SO₂ column density had obviously reduced from 2005 to 2008 in the Zhejiang Province of China. The highest SO₂ column density usually appeared at northen area of Zhejiang Province in winter. The SO₂ column density was declined along with the gradient from northern to southern area as the economic development and urbanization. We found there were significant negative relationships between land use and SO₂ column density. The highest SO₂ column density appeared at northern urban area, which is much higher than the others. The SO₂ column density was the lowest in forest region. The results approved that the OMI SO₂ column remotely sensed data can be used in air quality monitoring at regional scale.