Explore the vast range of titles available.

Severe regional haze pollution events occurred in eastern and central China in January 2013, which had adverse effects on the environment and public health. Extremely high levels of particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5) with dominant components of sulfate and nitrate are responsible for the haze pollution. Although heterogeneous chemistry is thought to play an important role in the production of sulfate and nitrate during haze episodes, few studies have comprehensively evaluated the effect of heterogeneous chemistry on haze formation in China by using the 3-D models due to of a lack of treatments for heterogeneous reactions in most climate and chemical transport models. In this work, the WRF-CMAQ model with newly added heterogeneous reactions is applied to East Asia to evaluate the impacts of heterogeneous chemistry and the meteorological anomaly during January 2013 on regional haze formation. As the parameterization of heterogeneous reactions on different types of particles is not well established yet, we arbitrarily selected the uptake coefficients from reactions on dust particles and then conducted several sensitivity runs to find the value that can best match observations. The revised CMAQ with heterogeneous chemistry not only captures the magnitude and temporal variation of sulfate and nitrate, but also reproduces the enhancement of relative contribution of sulfate and nitrate to PM2.5 mass from clean days to polluted haze days. These results indicate the significant role of heterogeneous chemistry in regional haze formation and improve the understanding of the haze formation mechanisms during the January 2013 episode.

Biomass burning, the largest global source of elemental carbon (EC) and primary organic carbon (OC), is strongly associated with many subjects of great scientific concern, such as secondary organic aerosol and brown carbon which exert important effects on the environment and on climate in particular. This study investigated the relationships between levoglucosan and other biomass burning tracers (i.e., water soluble potassium and mannosan) based on both ambient samples collected in Beijing and source samples. Compared with North America and Europe, Beijing was characterized by high ambient levoglucosan concentrations and low winter to summer ratios of levoglucosan, indicating significant impact of biomass burning activities throughout the year in Beijing. Comparison of levoglucosan and water soluble potassium (K+) levels suggested that it was acceptable to use K+ as a biomass burning tracer during summer in Beijing, while the contribution of fireworks to K+ could be significant during winter. Moreover, the levoglucosan to K+ ratio was found to be lower during the typical summer period (0.21 ± 0.16) compared with the typical winter period (0.51 ± 0.15). Levoglucosan correlated strongly with mannosan (R2 = 0.97) throughout the winter and the levoglucosan to mannosan ratio averaged 9.49 ± 1.63, whereas levoglucosan and mannosan exhibited relatively weak correlation (R2 = 0.73) during the typical summer period when the levoglucosan to mannosan ratio averaged 12.65 ± 3.38. Results from positive matrix factorization (PMF) model analysis showed that about 50% of the OC and EC in Beijing were associated with biomass burning processes. In addition, a new source identification method was developed based on the comparison of the levoglucosan to K+ ratio and the levoglucosan to mannosan ratio among different types of biomass. Using this method, the major source of biomass burning aerosol in Beijing was suggested to be the combustion of crop residuals, while the contribution from softwood burning was also non-negligible, especially in winter.

Extreme haze episodes repeatedly shrouded Beijing during the winter of 2012–2013, causing major environmental and health problems. To better understand these extreme events, we performed a model-assisted analysis of the hourly observation data of PM2.5 and its major chemical compositions. The synthetic analysis shows that (1) the severe winter haze was driven by stable synoptic meteorological conditions over northeastern China, and not by an abrupt increase in anthropogenic emissions. (2) Secondary species, including organics, sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium, were the major constituents of PM2.5 during this period. (3) Due to the dimming effect of high loading of aerosol particles, gaseous oxidant concentrations decreased significantly, suggesting a reduced production of secondary aerosols through gas-phase reactions. Surprisingly, the observational data reveals an enhanced production rate of secondary aerosols, suggesting an important contribution from other formation pathways, most likely heterogeneous reactions. These reactions appeared to be more efficient in producing secondary inorganics aerosols than organic aerosols resulting in a strongly elevated fraction of inorganics during heavily polluted periods. (4) Moreover, we found that high aerosol concentration was a regional phenomenon. The accumulation process of aerosol particles occurred successively from cities southeast of Beijing. The apparent sharp increase in PM2.5 concentration of up to several hundred μg m−3 per hour recorded in Beijing represented rapid recovery from an interruption to the continuous pollution accumulation over the region, rather than purely local chemical production. This suggests that regional transport of pollutants played an important role during these severe pollution events.

This paper, which focuses on emissions from China's coal-fired power plants during 1990–2010, is the second in a series of papers that aims to develop a high-resolution emission inventory for China. This is the first time that emissions from China's coal-fired power plants were estimated at unit level for a 20-year period. This inventory is constructed from a unit-based database compiled in this study, named the China coal-fired Power plant Emissions Database (CPED), which includes detailed information on the technologies, activity data, operation situation, emission factors, and locations of individual units and supplements with aggregated data where unit-based information is not available. Between 1990 and 2010, compared to a 479 % growth in coal consumption, emissions from China's coal-fired power plants increased by 56, 335, and 442 % for SO2, NOx, and CO2, respectively, and decreased by 23 and 27 % for PM2.5 and PM10 respectively. Driven by the accelerated economic growth, large power plants were constructed throughout the country after 2000, resulting in a dramatic growth in emissions. The growth trend of emissions has been effectively curbed since 2005 due to strengthened emission control measures including the installation of flue gas desulfurization (FGD) systems and the optimization of the generation fleet mix by promoting large units and decommissioning small ones. Compared to previous emission inventories, CPED significantly improved the spatial resolution and temporal profile of the power plant emission inventory in China by extensive use of underlying data at unit level. The new inventory developed in this study will enable a close examination of temporal and spatial variations of power plant emissions in China and will help to improve the performances of chemical transport models by providing more accurate emission data.

An accurate speciation mapping of non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC) emissions has an important impact on the performance of chemical transport models (CTMs) in simulating ozone mixing ratios and secondary organic aerosols. Taking the INTEX-B Asian NMVOC emission inventory as the case, we developed an improved speciation framework to generate model-ready anthropogenic NMVOC emissions for various gas-phase chemical mechanisms commonly used in CTMs in this work, by using an explicit assignment approach and updated NMVOC profiles. NMVOC profiles were selected and aggregated from a wide range of new measurements and the SPECIATE database v.4.2. To reduce potential uncertainty from individual measurements, composite profiles were developed by grouping and averaging source profiles from the same category. The fractions of oxygenated volatile organic compounds (OVOC) were corrected during the compositing process for those profiles which used improper sampling and analyzing methods. Emissions of individual species were then lumped into species in different chemical mechanisms used in CTMs by applying mechanism-dependent species mapping tables, which overcomes the weakness of inaccurate mapping in previous studies. Emission estimates for individual NMVOC species differ between one and three orders of magnitude for some species when different sets of profiles are used, indicating that source profile is the most important source of uncertainties of individual species emissions. However, those differences are diminished in lumped species as a result of the lumping in the chemical mechanisms. Gridded emissions for eight chemical mechanisms at 30 min × 30 min resolution as well as the auxiliary data are available at http://mic.greenresource.cn/intex-b2006. The framework proposed in this work can be also used to develop speciated NMVOC emissions for other regions.

The mass absorption efficiency (MAE) of elemental carbon (EC) in Beijing was quantified using a thermal-optical carbon analyzer. The MAE measured at 632 nm was 8.45±1.71 and 9.41±1.92 m2 g−1 during winter and summer respectively. The daily variation of MAE was found to coincide with the abundance of organic carbon (OC), especially the OC to EC ratio, perhaps due to the enhancement by coating with organic aerosol (especially secondary organic aerosol, SOA) or the artifacts resulting from the redistribution of liquid-like organic particles during the filter-based absorption measurements. Using a converting approach that accounts for the discrepancy caused by measurements methods of both light absorption and EC concentration, previously published MAE values were converted to the equivalent-MAE, which is the estimated value if using the same measurement methods as used in this study. The equivalent-MAE was found to be much lower in the regions heavily impacted by biomass burning (e.g., below 2.7 m2 g−1 for two Indian cities). Results from source samples (including diesel exhaust samples and biomass smoke samples) also demonstrated that emissions from biomass burning would decrease the MAE of EC. Moreover, optical properties of water-soluble organic carbon (WSOC) in Beijing were presented. Light absorption by WSOC exhibited strong wavelength (λ) dependence such that absorption varied approximately as λ−7, which was characteristic of the brown carbon spectra. The MAE of WSOC (measured at 365 nm) was 1.79±0.24 and 0.71±0.20 m2 g−1 during winter and summer respectively. The large discrepancy between the MAE of WSOC during winter and summer was attributed to the difference in the precursors of SOA such that anthropogenic volatile organic compounds (AVOCs) should be more important as the precursors of SOA in winter. The MAE of WSOC in Beijing was much higher than results from the southeastern United States which were obtained using the same method as used in this study, perhaps due to the stronger emissions of biomass burning in China.

It is well established that when a turbulent flow is subjected to a non-uniform body force, the turbulence may be significantly suppressed in comparison with that of the flow of the same flow rate and hence the flow is said to be laminarised. This is the situation in buoyancy-aided mixed convection when severe heat transfer deterioration may occur. Here we report results of direct numerical simulations of flow with a linear or a step-change profile of body force. In contrast to the conventional view, we show that applying a body force to a turbulent flow while keeping the pressure force unchanged causes little changes to the key characteristics of the turbulence. In particular, the mixing characteristics of the turbulence represented by the turbulent viscosity remain largely unaffected. The so-called flow laminarisation due to a body force is in effect a reduction in the apparent Reynolds number of the flow, based on an apparent friction velocity associated with only the pressure force of the flow (i.e. excluding the contribution of the body force). The new understanding allows the level of the flow ‘laminarisation’ and when the full laminarisation occurs to be readily predicted. In terms of the near-wall turbulence structure, the numbers of ejections and sweeps are little influenced by the imposition of the body force, whereas the strength of each event may be enhanced if the coverage of the body force extends significantly away from the wall. The streamwise turbulent stress is usually increased in accordance with the observation of more and stronger elongated streaks, but the wall-normal and the circumferential turbulent stresses are largely unchanged.

This study is the first in a series of papers that aim to develop high-resolution emission databases for different anthropogenic sources in China. Here we focus on on-road transportation. Because of the increasing impact of on-road transportation on regional air quality, developing an accurate and high-resolution vehicle emission inventory is important for both the research community and air quality management. This work proposes a new inventory methodology to improve the spatial and temporal accuracy and resolution of vehicle emissions in China. We calculate, for the first time, the monthly vehicle emissions for 2008 in 2364 counties (an administrative unit one level lower than city) by developing a set of approaches to estimate vehicle stock and monthly emission factors at county-level, and technology distribution at provincial level. We then introduce allocation weights for the vehicle kilometers traveled to assign the county-level emissions onto 0.05° × 0.05° grids based on the China Digital Road-network Map (CDRM). The new methodology overcomes the common shortcomings of previous inventory methods, including neglecting the geographical differences between key parameters and using surrogates that are weakly related to vehicle activities to allocate vehicle emissions. The new method has great advantages over previous methods in depicting the spatial distribution characteristics of vehicle activities and emissions. This work provides a better understanding of the spatial representation of vehicle emissions in China and can benefit both air quality modeling and management with improved spatial accuracy.

The mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is commonly activated in colon cancer. mTOR complex 1 (mTORC1) is a major downstream target of the PI3K/ATK pathway and activates protein synthesis by phosphorylating key regulators of messenger RNA translation and ribosome synthesis. Rapamycin analogs Everolimus and Temsirolimus are non-ATP-competitive mTORC1 inhibitors, and suppress proliferation and tumor angiogenesis and invasion. We now show that apoptosis plays a key role in their anti-tumor activities in colon cancer cells and xenografts through the DR5, FADD and caspase-8 axis, and is strongly enhanced by tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) and 5-fluorouracil. The induction of DR5 by rapalogs is mediated by the ER stress regulator and transcription factor CHOP, but not the tumor suppressor p53, on rapid and sustained inhibition of 4E-BP1 phosphorylation, and attenuated by eIF4E expression. ATP-competitive mTOR/PI3K inhibitors also promote DR5 induction and FADD-dependent apoptosis in colon cancer cells. These results establish activation of ER stress and the death receptor pathway as a novel anticancer mechanism of mTOR inhibitors.

The non-analyticity induced by exceptional points (EPs) has manifestations not only in non-Hermitian but also in Hermitian systems. In this work, we focus on a minimal Hermitian bosonic Kitaev model to reveal the dynamical demonstration of EPs in a Hermitian system. It is shown that the EPs separate the parameter space into four regions, in which the systems are characterized by different equivalent Hamiltonians, including the harmonic oscillator, the inverted harmonic oscillator, and their respective counterparts. We employ the second-order intensity correlation to characterize a nonequilibrium quantum phase transition by calculating the time evolution of a trivial initial state. The results indicate that the concept of the EP can be detected in a small Hermitian bosonic system.