• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.283-302
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• 2022

Despite the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in China since January 23, 2020, haze days with high PM₁₀ levels of 88-98 ㎍ m^-3 occurred on February 1 and 2, 2020. During these haze days, the East Asian region was affected by a warm and stagnant air mass with positive air temperature anomalies and negative zonal wind anomalies at 850 hPa. The Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) was used to analyze the variation of regional PM₁₀ aerosol transport in Korea due to decreased anthropogenic emissions in East Asia. The base experiment (BASE), which applies the basic anthropogenic emissions in the WRF-Chem model, and the control experiment (CTL) applied by reducing the anthropogenic emission to 50%, were used to assess uncertainty with ground-based PM₁₀ measurements in Korea. The index of agreement (IOA) for the CTL simulation was 0.71, which was higher than that of BASE (0.67). A statistical analysis of the results suggests that anthropogenic emissions were reduced during the COVID-19 lockdown period in China. Furthermore, BASE and CTL applied to zero-out anthropogenic emissions outside Korea (BASE_ZEOK and CTL_ZEOK) were used to analyze the variations of regional PM₁₀ aerosol transport in Korea. Regional PM₁₀ transport in CTL was reduced by only 10-20% compared to BASE. Synthetic weather variables may be another reason for the non-linear response to changes in the contribution of regional transport to PM₁₀ in Korea with the reduction of anthropogenic emissions in East Asia. Although the regional transport contribution of other inorganic aerosols was high in CTL (80-90%), sulfate-nitrate-ammonium (SNA) aerosols showed lower contributions of 0-20%, 30-60%, and 30-60%, respectively. The SNA secondary aerosols, particularly nitrates, presumably declined as the Chinese lockdown induced traffic.