Elucidating the impacts of rapid urban expansion on air quality in the Yangtze River Delta, China

Urban expansion not only results in land use transformation, but also introduces extra anthropogenic emissions over the expanded urban areas, which is usually neglected in existing studies. In this study, we consider both the changes in land use categories and added anthropogenic emissions from 2001 to 2018 in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) which we define as the city of Shanghai and the nearby provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui, China and explore the individual and combined impacts of these factors on air pollution using the WRF-Chem model. Calibrated by available observations, the model performs well (IOA (index of agreement) > 0.8) in reproducing the meteorological fields and ambient PM and O concentrations in September 2018. We show that the land use transformation from non-urban to urban and the introduced anthropogenic emissions over new urban areas exert opposite influences on ambient PM concentrations over YRD, particularly in the expanded urban areas, and the PM decrease due to land use changes is significantly offset by the increase due to added emissions. The response of ambient O concentration to these two factors is highly variable in space, which is dependent on the chemical regime of tropospheric O formation and influenced by the chemistry-meteorology feedback. As the total effect, strong increases in O concentration occur over the central areas of YRD. These results highlight that it is essential to take into account the additional anthropogenic emissions over expanded urban areas in the assessment of environmental impacts of urban expansion.