Coupling Air Quality Observation with Modeling to Validate Organic Pollutants as Indicators of Transboundary Pm2.5 Episodes

The island of Taiwan is unique as an ideal downwind location in East Asia to receive Asian continental outflow which inevitably affects the domestic air quality over the island under certain weather conditions. This proposal is a sub-project of the integrated project of 7-SEAS (Seven South East Asian Studies) to investigate regional pollution phenomena, e.g., Asian dust, biomass burning, China haze, etc. We propose to use the data of optical depth observed by the polar orbiting and geostationary satellites to determine the aerosol events transported to the island, and to categorize the weather patterns for the transboundary PM2.5 events. We intend to use the hourly data of organic pollutants provided by the network of PAMS (Photochemical Assessment Monitoring Stations) operated by Taiwan EPA in central and northern Taiwan as effective indexes to enhance the detection ability of the incoming PM2.5 events. The entire process of aerosol formation and transport of the continental outflow to Taiwan as the receiver can be simulated by the air-quality models of either trajectory or Eulerian type to facilitate understanding of the primary and secondary processes. The modeling results are then used to validate the effectiveness of using organic indexes as effective indicators of (1) the occurrence continental outflow and (2) transport and chemical evolution of organic pollutants in the outflow.