Spatiotemporal trends of PM2.5 concentrations in central China from 2003 to 2018 based on MAIAC-derived high-resolution data

Abstract

Long-term PM2.5 levels with high precision at fine spatiotemporal resolution are essential for quantitatively understanding the health risk of exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and making effective air pollution control policies. The emerging statistically derived PM2.5 estimations from satellite remote sensing observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) data are an effective alternative to reconstruct global, long-term, high spatiotemporal resolution PM2.5 information. However, studies on PM2.5 estimation and its application to exposure and health-related studies are limited in China due to the lack of historical in-situ measurements before 2013. In this study, we explored the long-term trends of PM2.5 exposure in central China, a hotspot that has recently been experiencing severe particulate pollution, at the local scale. We first developed a spatiotemporal model incorporating periodical characteristics within the data to estimate daily concentrations of historical PM2.5 at a fine scale of 1 km for 2003–2018. The linear effects of predictors including AOD, meteorological and land-use parameters and the non-linear interaction between AOD and meteorological parameters were considered in the modeling process. The most recently released high-resolution satellite aerosol product, Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC) was used to help to represent the fine-scale particle gradients. Our daily estimates correlated well with in-situ observations (cross-validation R2 = 0.59), achieving precision comparable to previous statistical models. Through linking with gridded demographic data, the population-weighted PM2.5 average during 2003 to 2018 was found to be high (62.23 μg/m3 for the whole domain) with obvious spatial variations and seasonality. An inverse U pattern was seen in the time series, with two inflection points around 2008 and 2015. Our model provides reliable particulate information with high spatial resolution and long-term temporal coverage, which can inform local-scale PM2.5-related epidemiological studies and health-risk assessments for central China. Keywords: Fine particulate matter, Satellite remote sensing, Aerosol optical depth, Spatiotemporal modeling, Long-term trend