Super dust storms re-occurred over East Asia in 2021 spring and casted great health damages and property losses. It is essential to achieve an accurate dust forecast to reduce the damage for early warning. The forecasting system fundamentally relies on a numerical model which can forecast the full evolution of dust storms. However, large uncertainties exist in model forecasts. Meanwhile, various near-real-time observations are available that contain valuable dust information. A dust storm forecasting system is here developed through coupling a chemical transport model, LOTOS-EUROS, and Localized EnKF (LEnKF) assimilation approach. The assimilations are carried out via an interface of our self-designed assimilation toolbox, PyFilter v1.0. Ground-based PM₁₀ measurements from air quality monitoring network are assimilated. Sequential assimilation tests are carried out over the 2021 spring super dust storms. The results show that the assimilation-based forecasting system produces a promising dust forecast than model-only forecast, and the improvements is also validated through comparing to the independent MODIS aerosol optical depth (AOD). Superior performance is obtained when LEnKF is implemented, as the localization helps EnKF in resolving the PM₁₀ measurements that have a large spatial variability with limited ensemble members. In addition, sensitivity experiments are conducted to exploit the distance-dependent localization for the LEnKF. Considering both cases, the optimal choice of the distance is tested to be around 500 km: the larger distance is less effective in removing the spurious correction, while the smaller one easily falls into the local optimum and the model would become divergent rapidly.

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Atmospheric ammonia has been hazardous to the environment and human health for decades. Current inventories are usually constructed in a bottom-up manner and subject to uncertainties and incapable of reproducing the spatiotemporal characteristics of ammonia emission. Satellite measurements, for example, Infrared Atmospheric Sounder Interferometer (IASI) and Cross-Track Infrared Sounder, which provide global coverage of ammonia distribution, have gained popularity in ammonia emission estimation through data assimilation methods. However, satellite-based emission inversion studies on China are limited. In this study, we propose a four-dimensional ensemble variational-based ammonia emission inversion system to optimize ammonia emissions in China. It was developed by assimilating the IASI ammonia retrievals onboard Meteorological Operational satellite A and B into a chemical transport model Goddard Earth Observing System Chemical model (GEOS-Chem). Monthly inversion experiments were conducted in April, July, and October 2016 to test the performance. The inversion result indicated that the prior inventory from the MEIC model captured ammonia spreads in general; however, it heterogeneously underrated the emission intensity. The increments obtained in the assimilation were as high as 50% in North, East, and Northwest China. The posterior emission inventory presented a regional emission flux consistent with relevant studies. Driven by the optimized source estimate, GEOS-Chem provides superior results than using the prior in the evaluation of the assimilated IASI retrievals and the surface ammonia concentration measured by the ground-based Ammonia Monitoring Network in China.

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Statistical methods, particularly machine learning models, have gained significant popularity in air quality predictions. These prediction models are commonly trained using the historical measurement datasets independently collected at the environmental monitoring stations and their operational forecasts in advance using inputs of the real-time ambient pollutant observations. Therefore, these high-quality machine learning models only provide site-available predictions and cannot solely be used as the operational forecast. In contrast, deterministic chemical transport models (CTMs), which simulate the full life cycles of air pollutants, provide predictions that are continuous in the 3D field. Despite their benefits, CTM predictions are typically biased, particularly on a fine scale, owing to the complex error sources due to the emission, transport, and removal of pollutants. In this study, we proposed a fusion of site-available machine learning prediction, which is from our regional feature selection-based machine learning model (RFSML v1.0), and a CTM prediction. Compared to the normal pure machine learning model, the fusion system provides a gridded prediction with relatively high accuracy. The prediction fusion was conducted using the Bayesian-theory-based ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). Background error covariance was an essential part in the assimilation process. Ensemble CTM predictions driven by the perturbed emission inventories were initially used for representing their spatial covariance statistics, which could resolve the main part of the CTM error. In addition, a covariance inflation algorithm was designed to amplify the ensemble perturbations to account for other model errors next to the uncertainty in emission inputs. Model evaluation tests were conducted based on independent measurements. Our EnKF-based prediction fusion presented superior performance compared to the pure CTM. Moreover, covariance inflation further enhanced the fused prediction, particularly in cases of severe underestimation.@en

With the explosive growth of atmospheric data, machine learning models have achieved great success in air pollution forecasting because of their higher computational efficiency than the traditional chemical transport models. However, in previous studies, new prediction algorithms have only been tested at stations or in a small region; a large-scale air quality forecasting model remains lacking to date. Huge dimensionality also means that redundant input data may lead to increased complexity and therefore the over-fitting of machine learning models. Feature selection is a key topic in machine learning development, but it has not yet been explored in atmosphere-related applications. In this work, a regional feature selection-based machine learning (RFSML) system was developed, which is capable of predicting air quality in the short term with high accuracy at the national scale. Ensemble-Shapley additive global importance analysis is combined with the RFSML system to extract significant regional features and eliminate redundant variables at an affordable computational expense. The significance of the regional features is also explained physically. Compared with a standard machine learning system fed with relative features, the RFSML system driven by the selected key features results in superior interpretability, less training time, and more accurate predictions. This study also provides insights into the difference in interpretability among machine learning models (i.e., random forest, gradient boosting, and multi-layer perceptron models).

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Last spring, super dust storms reappeared in East Asia after being absent for one and a half decades. The event caused enormous losses in both Mongolia and China. Accurate simulation of such super sandstorms is valuable for the quantification of health damage, aviation risks, and profound impacts on the Earth system, but also to reveal the climatic driving force and the process of desertification. However, accurate simulation of dust life cycles is challenging, mainly due to imperfect knowledge of emissions. In this study, the emissions that lead to the 2021 spring dust storms are estimated through assimilation of MODIS AOD and ground-based PM10 concentration data simultaneously. With this, the dust concentrations during these super storms could be reproduced and validated with concentration observations. The multi-observation assimilation is also compared against emission inversion that assimilates AOD or PM10 concentration measurements alone, and the added values are analyzed. The emission inversion results reveal that wind-blown dust emissions originated from both China and Mongolia during spring 2021. Specifically, 19.9×106 and 37.5×106ĝ€¯t of particles were released in the Chinese and Mongolian Gobi, respectively, during these severe dust events. By source apportionment it was revealed that the Mongolian Gobi poses more severe threats to the densely populated regions of the Fenwei Plain (FWP) and the North China Plain (NCP) located in northern China than does the Chinese Gobi. It was estimated that 63ĝ€¯% of the dust deposited in FWP was due to transnational transport from Mongolia. For NCP, the long-distance transport dust from Mongolia contributes about 69ĝ€¯% to the dust deposition.

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When calibrating simulations of dust clouds, both the intensity and the position are important. Intensity errors arise mainly from uncertain emission and sedimentation strengths, while position errors are attributed either to imperfect emission timing or to uncertainties in the transport. Though many studies have been conducted on the calibration or correction of dust simulations, most of these focus on intensity solely and leave the position errors mainly unchanged. In this paper, a grid-distorted data assimilation, which consists of an image-morphing method and an ensemble-based variational assimilation, is designed for realigning a simulated dust plume to correct the position error. This newly developed grid-distorted data assimilation has been applied to a dust storm event in May 2017 over East Asia. Results have been compared for three configurations: a traditional assimilation configuration that focuses solely on intensity correction, a grid-distorted data assimilation that focuses on position correction only and the hybrid assimilation that combines these two. For the evaluated case, the position misfit in the simulations is shown to be dominant in the results. The traditional emission inversion only slightly improves the dust simulation, while the grid-distorted data assimilation effectively improves the dust simulation and forecasting. The hybrid assimilation that corrects both position and intensity of the dust load provides the best initial condition for forecasting of dust concentrations.@en

Emission inversion using data assimilation fundamentally relies on having the correct assumptions about the emission background error covariance. A perfect covariance accounts for the uncertainty based on prior knowledge and is able to explain differences between model simulations and observations. In practice, emission uncertainties are constructed empirically; hence, a partially unrepresentative covariance is unavoidable. Concerning its complex parameterization, dust emissions are a typical example where the uncertainty could be induced from many underlying inputs, e.g., information on soil composition and moisture, land cover and erosive wind velocity, and these can hardly be taken into account together. This paper describes how an adjoint model can be used to detect errors in the emission uncertainty assumptions. This adjoint-based sensitivity method could serve as a supplement of a data assimilation inverse modeling system to trace back the error sources in case large observation-minus-simulation residues remain after assimilation based on empirical background covariance.

The method follows an application of a data assimilation emission inversion for an extreme severe dust storm over East Asia <span classCombining double low line"cit"idCombining double low line"xref_paren.1">(<a hrefCombining double low line"#bib1.bibx31">Jin et al.</a>, <a hrefCombining double low line"#bib1.bibx31">2019</a><a hrefCombining double low line"#bib1.bibx31">b</a>)</span>. The assimilation system successfully resolved observation-minus-simulation errors using satellite AOD observations in most of the dust-affected regions. However, a large underestimation of dust in Northeast China remained despite the fact that the assimilated measurements indicated severe dust plumes there. An adjoint implementation of our dust simulation model is then used to detect the most likely source region for these unresolved dust loads. The backward modeling points to the Horqin desert as the source region, which was indicated as a non-source region by the existing emission scheme. The reference emission and uncertainty are then reconstructed over the Horqin desert by assuming higher surface erodibility. After the emission reconstruction, the emission inversion is performed again, and the posterior dust simulations and reality are now in much closer harmony. Based on our results, it is advised that emission sources in dust transport models include the Horqin desert as a more active source region.

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