Source apportionment of PM2.5 in top polluted cities in Hebei, China using the CMAQ model

Hebei has been recognized as one of the most polluted provinces in China, characterized by extremely high concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in many of its cities, especially those located in the southern area of the province and highly potentially northward transported to Beijing. Source apportionment of PM2.5 is the basis and prerequisite of an effective control strategy. In this study, the Mesoscale Modeling System Generation 5 (MM5) and the Models-3/Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system are applied to East Asia and North China at 36- and 12-km horizontal grid resolutions, and the source apportionment of PM2.5 in the three top polluted cities in Hebei, i.e., Shijiazhuang, Xingtai, and Handan, is performed using the Brute-Force method. It is concluded that the regional source contributions to PM2.5 are 27.9% in Shijiazhuang, 46.6% in Xingtai, and 40.4% in Handan. The major local contributors are industrial, domestic and agricultural sources in all the three cities with the contributions of 39.8%, 15.8%, and 10.6% in Shijiazhuang, 30.5%, 13.6%, and 6.9% in Xingtai, 35.9%, 13.5%, and 6.2% in Handan, respectively. As to the secondary aerosols of sulfate (SO42−), nitrate (NO3−), and ammonium (NH4+) in PM2.5, which are important chemical species in PM2.5 (about 30–40% in PM2.5) and cannot be further apportioned by receptor models, the regional source contributions to the total concentrations of SO42−, NO3−, and NH4+ are 40.9%, 62.0%, and 59.1% in Shijiazhuang, Xingtai, and Handan, respectively. The local industrial, domestic and agricultural contributions to those are 23.7%, 6.6%, and 29.8% in total in Shijiazhuang, 17.5%, 5.0%, and 17.7% in Xingtai, and 20.6%, 4.8%, and 17.8% in Handan, respectively. The regional joint controls of air pollution are more important in Xingtai and Handan than in Shijiazhuang, and the emission controls of agricultural sources need to be further considered in the future policy.