Extreme Climate Events and Air Quality

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Air Quality".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 July 2021) | Viewed by 8779

Special Issue Editors

Instituto Dom Luíz, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisbon, Portugal
Interests: climate; remote sensing; wildfires; climate extremes such as drought and heatwaves
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, Edf. C8, Piso 3, Sala 8.3.03, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal
Interests: climate variability and extremes; droughts; heatwaves; vegetation dynamics; remote sensing; wildfires
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Atmosphere dedicates this special issue to the influence of weather and climate events on air quality.

In recent decades, air pollution has become a major environmental risk to human health, with great risk for children, older adults, and people with heart and lung diseases. Many world cities experience air pollution episodes regularly. The occurrence of air pollution episodes is often related to either high emissions of air pollutants or poor dispersion conditions, or to a combination of both, resulting from either local-scale conditions or regional-scale transport. Thus, meteorological conditions on various spatial and temporal scales have been reported to strongly affect air quality.

Extreme climate events, such as heat waves and droughts, have been reported in several studies to have consistently shown a synergistic effect to air pollution. Nonetheless, the potential weather–air pollution interaction during wildfires and dust storms is still poorly explored. Extreme events are also changing in terms of in duration, frequency, and spatial extent in response to climate change with potential impacts on future air quality. Therefore, understanding the impact of extreme climate events on air quality in a changing climate becomes crucial.

Original results and review papers related to the analysis of the synergistic effect between air pollution and weather and climate events are therefore welcomed. Authors are encouraged to analyse the underlying mechanisms associated to the occurrence of the weather interactions with air quality with the purpose of establishing linkages between local- to synoptic-scale patterns and air pollution, from both anthropogenic (traffic, industry, etc.) and natural (fires, dust storms) sources. Considering climate change, studies showing the health co-benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and urban air pollution are of particular interest for this Special Issue. This Special Issue is also an appropriate venue for papers that deal with the emerging field of compound events.

This Special Issue intends to be a useful and valuable snapshot of the overarching field for practitioners, and a means of stimulating multidisciplinary collaborations. Therefore, storyline approaches, which examines the role of the various factors contributing to the event as it unfolded, are also encouraged.

Dr. Ana Russo
Dr. Célia Gouveia
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • weather events
  • pollution
  • air quality
  • circulation-to-environment approach
  • compound events
  • ozone
  • PM10 and PM5
  • ultrafine particles
  • fires
  • intrusions

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 6367 KiB  
Article
Association between Prevailing Circulation Patterns and Coarse Particles in Portugal
by Rui Cavaleiro, Ana Russo, Pedro M. Sousa and Rita Durão
Atmosphere 2021, 12(1), 85; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12010085 - 08 Jan 2021
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 1977
Abstract
Air pollution is one of the major environmental concerns today, with high socio-economic and public health impacts, which are expected to worsen in the future due to anthropogenic warming. Among the toxic agents present in the atmosphere, coarse particles (PM10 and PM2.5) are [...] Read more.
Air pollution is one of the major environmental concerns today, with high socio-economic and public health impacts, which are expected to worsen in the future due to anthropogenic warming. Among the toxic agents present in the atmosphere, coarse particles (PM10 and PM2.5) are some of the most harmful for human health and the environment. Therefore, the study of these particles and their association with meteorological constraining factors is of utmost importance. The aim of this study is to analyze the circulation weather types (CWT) affecting PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations measured at background monitoring stations in Portugal between 2006 and 2018. PM10 and PM2.5 were analyzed in terms of their intra-annual and inter-annual variability, their relations with CWT and the characteristics of two major extreme events over Portugal. The analysis of the extreme events relied on both background stations and through the near-real time data from Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) outputs. The inter-annual assessment showed a decrease in concentrations over the studied years, mainly for PM10. Intra-annual assessment pointed to higher concentrations during winter months. Higher PM concentrations were mostly associated with CWTs with easterly or southerly components, characterized by low frequency of rainfall and advection of dry air masses. The two analyzed extreme events, associated with mega wildfires (15–17 October 2017) and dust intrusion (1–10 August 2018) were analyzed in more detail. Prominent southerly and easterly circulations were observed during the onset and peak of the events, which then later decayed due to the change to maritime flows (westerly and northerly circulation types) which dispersed the particles. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Extreme Climate Events and Air Quality)
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18 pages, 1595 KiB  
Article
Heat and Ozone Pollution Waves in Central and South Europe—Characteristics, Weather Types, and Association with Mortality
by Elke Hertig, Ana Russo and Ricardo M. Trigo
Atmosphere 2020, 11(12), 1271; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos11121271 - 24 Nov 2020
Cited by 19 | Viewed by 3116
Abstract
Air pollution and hot temperatures present two major health risks, especially for vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and people with pre-existing conditions. Episodes of high ozone concentrations and heat waves have been registered throughout Europe and are expected to continue to [...] Read more.
Air pollution and hot temperatures present two major health risks, especially for vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and people with pre-existing conditions. Episodes of high ozone concentrations and heat waves have been registered throughout Europe and are expected to continue to grow due to climate change. Here, several different heat and ozone wave definitions were applied to characterize the wave-type extremes for two climatically different regions, i.e., Portugal (South Europe) and Bavaria (Central Europe), and their impacts were evaluated considering each type of hazard independently but also when they occur simultaneously. Heat and ozone waves were analyzed with respect to the underlying atmospheric circulation patterns and in terms of their association with human mortality. Heat waves were identified as the most frequent wave type and, despite different climate settings, a comparable exposure to heat and ozone waves was found in Central and South Europe. Waves were associated with in-situ built-up as well as with advection of air masses. However, in Bavaria waves showed the strongest connection with autochthonous weather conditions, while for Portugal, the strongest relationship appeared for eastern and north-eastern inflow. The most severe events, as measured by excess mortality, were always associated to compound heat-ozone waves. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Extreme Climate Events and Air Quality)
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37 pages, 769 KiB  
Article
Impact of Urbanization on the Predictions of Urban Meteorology and Air Pollutants over Four Major North American Cities
by Shuzhan Ren, Craig A. Stroud, Stephane Belair, Sylvie Leroyer, Rodrigo Munoz-Alpizar, Michael D. Moran, Junhua Zhang, Ayodeji Akingunola and Paul A. Makar
Atmosphere 2020, 11(9), 969; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos11090969 - 10 Sep 2020
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2921
Abstract
The sensitivities of meteorological and chemical predictions to urban effects over four major North American cities are investigated using the high-resolution (2.5-km) Environment and Climate Change Canada’s air quality model with the Town Energy Balance (TEB) scheme. Comparisons between the model simulation results [...] Read more.
The sensitivities of meteorological and chemical predictions to urban effects over four major North American cities are investigated using the high-resolution (2.5-km) Environment and Climate Change Canada’s air quality model with the Town Energy Balance (TEB) scheme. Comparisons between the model simulation results with and without the TEB effect show that urbanization has great impacts on surface heat fluxes, vertical diffusivity, air temperature, humidity, atmospheric boundary layer height, land-lake circulation, air pollutants concentrations and Air Quality Health Index. The impacts have strong diurnal variabilities, and are very different in summer and winter. While the diurnal variations of the impacts share some similarities over each city, the magnitudes can be very different. The underlying mechanisms of the impacts are investigated. The TEB impacts on the predictions of meteorological and air pollutants over Toronto are evaluated against ground-based observations. The results show that the TEB scheme leads to a great improvement in biases and root-mean-square deviations in temperature and humidity predictions in downtown, uptown and suburban areas in the early morning and nighttime. The scheme also leads to a big improvement of predictions of NOx, PM2.5 and ground-level ozone in the downtown, uptown and industrial areas in the early morning and nighttime. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Extreme Climate Events and Air Quality)
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