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EPA reports a steady decline of US anthropogenic NO x emissions in 2005–2019 summers, while NO2 vertical column densities (VCDs) from the OMI satellite over large spatial domains have flattened since 2009. To better understand the contributing factors to a flattening of the OMI NO2 trends, we investigate the role of soil and lightning NOx emissions on this apparent disagreement. We improve soil NO x emissions estimates using a new observation-based temperature response, which increases the linear correlation coefficient between GEOS-Chem simulated and OMI NO2 VCDs by 0.05–0.2 over the Central US. Multivariate trend analysis reveals that soil and lightning NO x combined emissions trends change from −3.95% a−1 during 2005–2009 to 0.60% a−1 from 2009 to 2019, thereby rendering the abrupt slowdown of total NO x emissions reduction. Non-linear inter-annual variations explain 6.6% of the variance of total NO x emissions. As background emissions become relatively larger with uncertain inter-annual variations, the NO2 VCDs alone at the national scale, especially in the regions with vast rural areas, will be insufficient to discern the trend of anthropogenic emissions.

Emission inventory development for air pollutants, by compiling records from individual emission sources, takes many years and involves extensive multi-national effort. A complementary method to estimate air pollution emissions is in the use of satellite remote sensing. In this study, NO 2 observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument are combined with re-analysis meteorology to estimate urban nitrogen oxide (NO X ) emissions for 80 global cities between 2005 and 2019. The global average downward trend in satellite-derived urban NO X emissions was 3.1%–4.0% yr −1 between 2009 and 2018 while inventories show a 0%–2.2% yr −1 drop over the same timeframe. This difference is primarily driven by discrepancies between satellite-derived urban NO X emissions and inventories in Africa, China, India, Latin America, and the Middle East. In North America, Europe, Korea, Japan, and Australasia, NO X emissions dropped similarly as reported in the inventories. In Europe, Korea, and Japan only, the temporal trends match the inventories well, but the satellite estimate is consistently larger over time. While many of the discrepancies between satellite-based and inventory emissions estimates represent real differences, some of the discrepancies might be related to the assumptions made to compare the satellite-based estimates with inventory estimates, such as the spatial disaggregation of emissions inventories. Our work identifies that the three largest uncertainties in the satellite estimate are the tropospheric column measurements, wind speed and direction, and spatial definition of each city.

Tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) column densities detected from space are widely used to infer trends in terrestrial nitrogen oxide (NO x ) emissions. We study changes in NO2 column densities using the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) over China from 2005 to 2015 and compare them with the bottom-up inventory to examine NO x emission trends and their driving forces. From OMI measurements we detect the peak of NO2 column densities at a national level in the year 2011, with average NO2 column densities deceasing by 32% from 2011 to 2015 and corresponding to a simultaneous decline of 21% in bottom-up emission estimates. A significant variation in the peak year of NO2 column densities over regions is observed. Because of the reasonable agreement between the peak year of NO2 columns and the start of deployment of denitration devices, we conclude that power plants are the primary contributor to the NO2 decline, which is further supported by the emission reduction of 56% from the power sector in the bottom-up emission inventory associated with the penetration of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) increasing from 18% to 86% during 2011–2015. Meanwhile, regulations for vehicles also make a significant contribution to NO x emission reductions, in particular for a few urbanized regions (e.g., Beijing and Shanghai), where they implemented strict regulations for vehicle emissions years before the national schedule for SCR installations and thus reached their NO2 peak 2–3 years ahead of the deployment of denitration devices for power plants.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States remains one of the most influential books and widely read books about race. Racial Formation in the 21st Century, arriving twenty-five years after the publication of Omi and Winant's influential work, brings together fourteen essays by leading scholars in law, history, sociology, ethnic studies, literature, anthropology and gender studies to consider the past, present and future of racial formation. The contributors explore far-reaching concerns: slavery and land ownership; labor and social movements; torture and war; sexuality and gender formation; indigineity and colonialism; genetics and the body. From the ecclesiastical courts of seventeenth century Lima to the cell blocks of Abu Grahib, the essays draw from Omi and Winant's influential theory of racial formation and adapt it to the various criticisms, challenges, and changes of life in the twenty-first century.

Top‐down constraints on global sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions are inferred through inverse modeling using SO2 column observations from two satellite instruments (SCIAMACHY and OMI). We first evaluated the SO2 column observations with surface SO2 measurements by applying local scaling factors from a global chemical transport model (GEOS‐Chem) to SO2 columns retrieved from the satellite instruments. The resulting annual mean surface SO2 mixing ratios for 2006 exhibit a significant spatial correlation (r = 0.86, slope = 0.91 for SCIAMACHY and r = 0.80, slope = 0.79 for OMI) with coincident in situ measurements from monitoring networks throughout the United States and Canada. We evaluate the GEOS‐Chem simulation of the SO2 lifetime with that inferred from in situ measurements to verify the applicability of GEOS‐Chem for inversion of SO2 columns to emissions. The seasonal mean SO2 lifetime calculated with the GEOS‐Chem model over the eastern United States is 13 h in summer and 48 h in winter, compared to lifetimes inferred from in situ measurements of 19 ± 7 h in summer and 58 ± 20 h in winter. We apply SO2 columns from SCIAMACHY and OMI to derive a top‐down anthropogenic SO2 emission inventory over land by using the local GEOS‐Chem relationship between SO2 columns and emissions. There is little seasonal variation in the top‐down emissions (<15%) over most major industrial regions providing some confidence in the method. Our global estimate for annual land surface anthropogenic SO2 emissions (52.4 Tg S yr−1 from SCIAMACHY and 49.9 Tg S yr−1 from OMI) closely agrees with the bottom‐up emissions (54.6 Tg S yr−1) in the GEOS‐Chem model and exhibits consistency in global distributions with the bottom‐up emissions (r = 0.78 for SCIAMACHY, and r = 0.77 for OMI). However, there are significant regional differences.

Emission inventory development for air pollutants, by compiling records from individual emission sources, takes many years and involves extensive multi-national effort. A complementary method to estimate air pollution emissions is in the use of satellite remote sensing. In this study, NO2 observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument are combined with re-analysis meteorology to estimate urban nitrogen oxide (NOX) emissions for 80 global cities between 2005 and 2019. The global average downward trend in satellite-derived urban NOX emissions was 3.1%–4.0% yr-1 between 2009 and 2018 while inventories show a 0%–2.2% yr-1 drop over the same timeframe. This difference is primarily driven by discrepancies between satellite-derived urban NOX emissions and inventories in Africa, China, India, Latin America, and the Middle East. In North America, Europe, Korea, Japan, and Australasia, NOX emissions dropped similarly as reported in the inventories. In Europe, Korea, and Japan only, the temporal trends match the inventories well, but the satellite estimate is consistently larger over time. While many of the discrepancies between satellite-based and inventory emissions estimates represent real differences, some of the discrepancies might be related to the assumptions made to compare the satellite-based estimates with inventory estimates, such as the spatial disaggregation of emissions inventories. Our work identifies that the three largest uncertainties in the satellite estimate are the tropospheric column measurements, wind speed and direction, and spatial definition of each city.

Tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) column densities detected from space are widely used to infer trends in terrestrial nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions. We study changes in NO2 column densities using the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) over China from 2005 to 2015 and compare them with the bottom-up inventory to examine NOx emission trends and their driving forces. From OMI measurements we detect the peak of NO2 column densities at a national level in the year 2011, with average NO2 column densities deceasing by 32% from 2011 to 2015 and corresponding to a simultaneous decline of 21% in bottom-up emission estimates. A significant variation in the peak year of NO2 column densities over regions is observed. Because of the reasonable agreement between the peak year of NO2 columns and the start of deployment of denitration devices, we conclude that power plants are the primary contributor to the NO2 decline, which is further supported by the emission reduction of 56% from the power sector in the bottom-up emission inventory associated with the penetration of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) increasing from 18% to 86% during 2011-2015. Meanwhile, regulations for vehicles also make a significant contribution to NOx emission reductions, in particular for a few urbanized regions (e.g., Beijing and Shanghai), where they implemented strict regulations for vehicle emissions years before the national schedule for SCR installations and thus reached their NO2 peak 2-3 years ahead of the deployment of denitration devices for power plants.

The hydroxyl radical (OH) fuels tropospheric ozone production and governs the lifetime of methane and many other gases. Existing methods to quantify global OH are limited to annual and global-to-hemispheric averages. Finer resolution is essential for isolating model deficiencies and building process-level understanding. In situ observations from the Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission demonstrate that remote tropospheric OH is tightly coupled to the production and loss of formaldehyde (HCHO), a major hydrocarbon oxidation product. Synthesis of this relationship with satellite-based HCHO retrievals and model-derived HCHO loss frequencies yields a map of total-column OH abundance throughout the remote troposphere (up to 70% of tropospheric mass) over the first two ATom missions (August 2016 and February 2017). This dataset offers unique insights on near-global oxidizing capacity. OH exhibits significant seasonality within individual hemispheres, but the domain mean concentration is nearly identical for both seasons (1.03 ± 0.25 × 106 cm−3), and the biseasonal average North/South Hemisphere ratio is 0.89 ± 0.06, consistent with a balance of OH sources and sinks across the remote troposphere. Regional phenomena are also highlighted, such as a 10-fold OH depression in the Tropical West Pacific and enhancements in the East Pacific and South Atlantic. This method is complementary to budget-based global OH constraints and can help elucidate the spatial and temporal variability of OH production and methane loss.

Quantifying the contribution of natural ecosystems on air quality regulation can help to lay the foundation for ecological construction, and to promote the sustainable development of natural ecosystems. To identify the spatio-temporal dynamic changes of natural vegetation regulation on SO2 absorption and the underlying mechanism of these changes in Qinghai Province, an important ecological barrier and the unique natural ecosystems, the Biome-BGC model was improved to simulate the canopy conductance to SO2 and leaf area index (LAI) on the daily scale, and then the SO2 absorption by vegetation was estimated coupling SO2 concentration from satellite data. Our results showed that the annual average SO2 absorption of the natural ecosystems in Qinghai Province was 4.74 × 104 tons yr−1 from 2005 to 2018, accounting for about 40% of the total emissions. Spatially, the ecosystem service of SO2 absorption gradually decreased from southeast to northwest, and varied from 0 in Haixi state to 14.37 kg SO2 ha−1 yr−1 in Haibei state. The annual average SO2 absorption in unit area was 0.68 kg SO2 ha−1 yr−1, and significantly higher SO2 absorption was observed in summer with 0.45 kg SO2 ha−1 quarterly. The canopy conductance and LAI controlled by climate variables would be the dominant driving factors for the variation of SO2 absorption for natural ecosystems. The sensitivity analysis showed that SO2 concentration contributed more to the uncertainties of SO2 absorption than the conductance in this study. Our results could provide powerful supports for realistic eco-environmental policy and decision making.

To mitigate tropospheric ozone (O3) pollution with proper and effective emission regulations, diagnostics for the O3-sensitive regime are critical. In this study, we analyzed the satellite-measured formaldehyde (HCHO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) column densities and derived the HCHO to NO2 ratio (FNR) from 2005 to 2019. Over China, there was a clear increase in the NO2 column during the first 5-year period and a subsequent decrease after 2010. Over the Republic of Korea and Japan, there was a continuous decline in the NO2 column over 15 years. Over the entire East Asia, a substantial increase in the HCHO column was identified during 2015–2019. Therefore, FNR increased over almost all of East Asia, especially during 2015–2019. This increasing trend in FNR indicated the gradual shift from a volatile organic compound (VOC)-sensitive to a nitrogen oxide (NOx)-sensitive regime. The long-term changes in HCHO and NO2 columns generally corresponded to anthropogenic non-methane VOC (NMVOC) and NOx emissions trends; however, anthropogenic sources did not explain the increasing HCHO column during 2015–2019. Because of the reduction in anthropogenic sources, the relative importance of biogenic NMVOC sources has been increasing and could have a larger impact on changing the O3-sensitive regime over East Asia.