The impacts of regional transport on anthropogenic source contributions of PM 2.5 in a basin city, China

PM pollution events are often happened in urban agglomeration locates in mountain-basin regions due to the complex terra and intensive emissions. Source apportionment is essential for identifying the pollution sources and important for developing local mitigation strategies, however, it is influenced by regional transport. To understand how the regional transport influences the atmospheric environment of a basin, we connected the PM source contributions estimated by observation-based receptor source apportionment and the regional contributions estimated by a tagging technology in the comprehensive air quality model with extensions (CAMx) via an artificial neural network (ANNs). The result shows that the PM in Xi'an was from biomass burning, coal combustion, traffic related emissions, mineral dust, industrial emissions, secondary nitrate and sulfate. 48.8 % of the PM in study period was from Xi'an, then followed by the outside area of Guanzhong basin (28.2 %), Xianyang (14.6 %) and Weinan (5.8 %). Baoji and Tongchuan contributed trivial amount. The sensitivity analysis showed that the transported PM would lead to divergent results of source contributions at Xi'an. The transported PM from the outside has great a potential to alter the source contributions implying a large uncertainty of the source apportionment introduced when long-range transported pollutants arrived. It suggests that a full comprehension on the impacts of regional transport can lower the uncertainty of the local PM source apportionment and reginal collaborative actions can be of great use for pollution mitigation.