Long-term characteristics of satellite-based PM2.5 over East China

With the explosive economic development of China over the past few decades, air pollution has become a serious environmental problem and has attracted increasing global concern. Using satellite-based PM2.5 data from 2000 to 2015, we found that the temporal-spatial variation of PM2.5 in East China is characterized by high concentrations in the northern part and low concentrations in the southern part of East China, and by being seasonally high in autumn and winter but low in spring and summer. We also found that the regional average PM2.5 concentration shows an approximative peak pattern over the last 16 years, with the highest, 60.13 mu gm(-3), and the lowest, 46.18 mu g m(-3), occurring in 2007 and 2000, respectively. Despite obviously diminishing heavy polluted regions with a PM2.5 of >80 mu g m(-3) after 2011, those cells dominated by natural background have still not recovered back to the clean level of 2000. These characteristics are valuable information to analyze the relative contributions of anthropogenic emissions and atmospheric conditions to the temporal-spatial variation characteristics of PM2.5. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Shanghai Science and Technology Committee Research Project [16ZR1431700]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [91637101]SCI(E)ARTICLE1417-142361