The international journal of Aerosol and Air Quality Research (AAQR) covers all aspects of aerosol science and technology, atmospheric science and air quality related issues.

The air quality of Handan, a typical industrial city in China, has been significantly improved through atmospheric pollution control, except for ozone (O₃) pollution. We found that, in summer, emissions of anthropogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and NO_x decreased yearly in Handan, but the O₃ concentration significantly declined yearly during 2013–2015, whereas it experienced worsening O₃ pollution after 2015. Therefore, we used the Weather Research and Forecasting Community Multiscale Air Quality (WRF–CMAQ) modeling system to simulate the influence of the meteorological conditions and emission changes in Handan during the typical period (June) of O₃ pollution in 2013–2018. For benchmarked June 2013, the results showed that the reduction of the O₃ concentration in June of 2014–2016 was mainly caused by emission reduction, while in June of 2017–2018, the combined effect of changes in emissions and meteorological conditions led to aggravated O₃ pollution. Sensitivity analysis indicated that combined VOCs and NO_x emission controls would effectively reduce incremental O₃ formation when the abatement ratio of VOCs/NO_x should be no less than 0.84, and we found that VOCs reduction would continusouly bring about O₃ decreases under various NO_x reductions, but its positive sensitivity to O₃ would become smaller with NO_x reduction. However, the positive influence of NO_x reduction on O₃ would happen until NO_x reduction exceeding 45–60%. The findings will be helpful in formulating emission control strategies for coping with O₃ pollution in an industrial city.

The MM5-CMAx-PSAT modeling approach was presented to identify the variation of emission contribution from each modeling grid to regional and urban air quality per unit emission rate change. The method was applied to a case study in Tangshan Municipality, a typical industrial region in northern China. The variation of emission contribution to the monthly atmospheric SO₂concentrations in Tangshan from each modeling grid of 9 × 9 km per 1000 t/yr of emission rate change was simulated for four representative months in 2006. It was found that the northwestern part of Tangshan region had the maximum contribution variation ratio (i.e., greater than 0.36%) to regional air quality, while the lowest contribution variation ratio (i.e., less than 0.3%) occurred in the coastal areas. Principal component analysis (PCA), canonical correlation analysis (CCA), and Pearson correlation analysis indicated that there was an obvious negative correlation between the grid-based variation of emission contribution to regional air quality and planetary boundary layer height (PBLH) as well as wind speed, while terrain data presented insignificant impacts on emission contribution variation. The proposed method was also applied to analyze the variation of emission contribution to the urban air quality of Tangshan (i.e., a smaller scale).