Amnuaylojaroen, T.; Inkom, J.; Janta, R.; Surapipith, V. Long Range Transport of Southeast Asian PM2.5 Pollution to Northern Thailand during High Biomass Burning Episodes. Sustainability, 2020, 12, 10049. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310049.
Amnuaylojaroen, T.; Inkom, J.; Janta, R.; Surapipith, V. Long Range Transport of Southeast Asian PM2.5 Pollution to Northern Thailand during High Biomass Burning Episodes. Sustainability, 2020, 12, 10049. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310049.
Amnuaylojaroen, T.; Inkom, J.; Janta, R.; Surapipith, V. Long Range Transport of Southeast Asian PM2.5 Pollution to Northern Thailand during High Biomass Burning Episodes. Sustainability, 2020, 12, 10049. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310049.
Amnuaylojaroen, T.; Inkom, J.; Janta, R.; Surapipith, V. Long Range Transport of Southeast Asian PM2.5 Pollution to Northern Thailand during High Biomass Burning Episodes. Sustainability, 2020, 12, 10049. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310049.
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the airflow that can transport emission sources of PM2.5 from neighboring countries to contribute to air pollution in northern Thailand. We applied the coupled atmospheric and air pollution model which is based on the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) and a Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory Model (HYSPLIT). The model output was compared to the ground-based measurement from the Pollution Control Department (PCD) to examine model performance. As a result of model evaluation, the meteorological variables fairly agreed well compared to observation with Index of Agreement (IOA) in ranges of 0.57 to 0.79 for temperature and 0.32 to 0.54 for wind speed, while the fractional bias of temperature and wind speed were 1.3 to 2.5 °C and 1.2 to 2.1 m/s. Burma was a country that contributed much of hotpot locations by 37% of the entire hotspot locations of Southeast Asia in March. The influence of the Asian Monsoon can bring pollutants from neighboring countries such as Burma and Laos toward northern Thailand in March that likely contribute to high concentrations of PM2.5 in northern Thailand.
Keywords
PM2.5; biomass burning; long-range transport of PM2.5; Source of PM2.5
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Atmospheric Science and Meteorology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.