Saturday, January 26, 2008

Air pollution in mega cities in China: A Review

Air pollution (both gas and particle) in Chinese mega cities is one of the biggest growing problems due to rapid increase in industrial activities in the area. A review article on air pollution in China entitled “Air pollution in mega cities in China” by Chan and Yao is published in January 2008 issue of Atmospheric Environment. This article provides through review of available literature on air pollution research in China and focused areas are Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta region.

Here, I am providing some highlights of the article. Please refer original article for more details.

"Air pollution has become one of the top environmental concerns in China. Currently, Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta region including Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and their immediate vicinities are the most economically vibrant regions in China.”

Air quality in most Chinese cities has improved despite the rapid growth of the economy…, however… He et al. (2001) and Ye et al. (2003) reported that PM2.5 concentrations in Beijing and Shanghai, the two largest cities in China, were about 10 times and six times the WHO guideline values, respectively.”

“From 1980 to 2005, the urban population in China increased from 19.6 to 40.5%. The number of cities increased to over 660, and more than 170 cities had over 1 million permanent residents (not including the migrant population) in 2004.”

“Much attention has been paid to reducing emissions, particularly vehicle emissions. Although the number of vehicles has increased by about 10% per year in these cities, NO2 and CO concentrations have not increased due to effective control measures… Particulate pollution is still severe, and it is the major air pollution problem in the mega cities.”


Complete Reference:

Chan, C. K. and X. Yao (2008, January), Air pollution in mega cities in china, Atmospheric Environment 42 (1), 1-42, doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2007.09.003

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

One Year of Aerosol Blog (about us)

Hello all Readers,

Today, aerosol blog completed successful one year. So we thought to write a blog about our blog. The blog was started last year in first week of January. Initially there were only two authors (Harish and Pawan) but soon Falguni, Neeraj and Dilip joined team, making it possible to post 42 posts in one year, almost one post per week. Here we take a look on what make us to start this blog, what content is dear to us and what is the future of this blog.

"Hey listen to this!"

It is common tendency of human being when we see something interesting we want to share it with others. Who is not aware of such a friendly shout "hey listen to this" with family members at home, with friends in hostel, when someone found interesting paragraph in news-paper or book. We five members of current team once upon a time where in Physical Research Laboratory and use to enjoy such a sharing. Later on we moved to different places but still use to shout through e-mail "Hey see this is interesting". Every year more than 7500 peer reviewed articles are published in the field of atmospheric science, quite a big fraction of it are published in the field quite close to our research work. We realized that it would be very useful if there would have been a guide to help short-list relevant articles. With these two intention we started blog, later on we realized that blog is quite promising medium for publication and can work as e-magazine.

Objectives

Our current objective is to provide pointer to information relevant to the research in the field of aerosols, clouds and climate change, be it journal article, book, web-site, biography, patent, database, conference or job. It is also part of objective to provide perspective why that piece of information is interesting. However as far as possible we want to focus on technical aspects of the research in this field rather than popular aspects. In future we want to transform our blog in e-magazine with its own articles, commentaries, digest and announcements.

Is this blog free?

This blog is free for viewing, but free is very deceptive word. We believe truly free viewing should be free of advertisements. What is the point in shortlisting articles if again one has to search them through jungle of ad links. We are able to provide it free because we are using resources available free of charge. As stated in earlier paragraph that we intend to make our blog an e-magazine. This may require some kind of investment such as server, software, domain name etc. But it will be our highest priority to run this blog free of charge and free of advertisement.

Who are the authors?

We are currently five authors who are responsible to update blog on regular basis. We have established credentials in this field and have articles published in peer reviewed journals. More information about authors can be found at their home-page listed below

Harish Gadhavi- http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~harish/
Post doctoral research fellow at University of Maryland, College Park

Pawan Gupta
- http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/~gupta/
Graduate student at University of Alabama, Huntsville

Neeraj Rastogi
- http://www.prl.res.in/~nrastogi
Post doctoral research fellow at University of Georgia, Atlanta

Falguni Gupta
- http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/~falguni/
Graduate student at Universtiy of Alabama, Huntsville

Dilip Ganguly
- http://www.prl.res.in/~dganguly/
Post doctoral research fellow at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

We welcome contributions from anyone who wants to contribute or share a piece of information consistent with the theme of blog. Announcement regarding conferences, job are most welcome. Contact information can be found in the end of the blog

Copyright

We have unspecified status of copyright for our blog. Authors own the copyright individually as allows the law. If not specifically mentioned about restriction, feel free to use our blog for non-commercial purpose. We sometime use figures and texts from others as fair use policy allows, but copyright to those figures and texts belongs to originating source. We try our best to cite full reference for such a source. If we have adversely used copyrighted material, please bring to our notice and we will immediately remove it. Contact information can be found in the end of the blog

Please see the home-pages of authors to contact authors individually.

Thanks to Harish for preparing these notes!