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and during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games trafc control period
Ting Wang, Shaodong Xie
*
College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 29 March 2009
Received in revised form
15 July 2009
Accepted 20 July 2009
Keywords:
Air pollution
Trafc pollution
Street canyon
OSPM
2008 Olympic Games
a b s t r a c t
In order to investigate the air quality and the abatement of trafc-related pollution during the 2008
Olympic Games, we select 12 avenues in the urban area of Beijing to calculate the concentrations of PM
10
,
CO, NO
2
and O
3
before and during the Olympic trafc controlling days, with the OSPM model.
Through comparing the modeled results with the measurement results on a representative street, the
OSPM model is validated as sufcient to predict the average concentrations of these pollutants at street
level, and also reects their daily variations well, i.e. CO presents the similar double peaks as the trafc
ow, PM
10
concentration is inuenced by other sources. Meanwhile, the model predicts O
3
to stay less
during the daytime and ascend in the night, just opposite to NO
2
, which reveals the impact of photo-
chemical reactions. In addition, the predicted concentrations on the windward side often exceed the
leeward side, indicating the impact of the special street shape, as well as the wind.
The comparison between the predicted street concentrations before and during the Olympic trafc
control period shows that the overall on-road air quality was improved effectively, due to the 32.3%
trafc ow reduction. The concentrations of PM
10
, CO and NO
2
have reduced from 142.6 mg m
3
,
3.02 mg m
3
and 118.7 mg m
3
to 102.0 mg m
3
, 2.43 mg m
3
and 104.1 mg m
3
. However, the different
pollutants show diverse changes after the trafc control. PM
10
decreases most, and the reduction effect
focusing on the rst half-day even clears the morning peak, whereas CO and NO
2
have even reductions to
minify the daily uctuations on the whole. Opposite to the other pollutants, ozone shows an increase of
concentration. The average reduction rate of PM
10
, CO, NO
2
and O
3
are respectively 28%, 19.3%, 12.3% and
25.2%. Furthermore, the streets in east, west, south and north areas present different air quality
improvements, probably induced by the varied background pollution in different regions around Beijing,
along with the impact of wind force. This nding suggests the pollution control in the surrounding
regions, not only in the urban area.
2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The air quality of Beijing during the 29th Olympic Games attracts
wide attention fromthe public. It is even the reason that Beijing has
once been challenged for, as the concentrations of PM
10
and NO
2
in
Beijing in 2004 were 146 mg m
3
and 70.2 mg m
3
respectively
(Beijing EPA, 2004), both substantially exceeding the WHO air
quality guideline limits (20 mg m
3
for PM
10
, for which the Iinterim
target-1 is 70 mg m
3
, and 40 mg m
3
for NO
2
) (WHO, 2006); and the
ozone concentration also increased rapidly through recent years
(Fang et al., 2009), which caused concerns on the athletes health.
The vehicle has become an important pollution source of Beijing
(Cai and Xie, 2007), and also major reason of severe secondary
pollution. In order to improve the air quality, Beijing government
has applied comprehensive measures these years to control the
vehicle pollution, i.e. adopting stricter emission standard, control-
ling heavy-exhaust vehicles, and developing the public trans-
portation. Furthermore, from July 1, 2008 to September 20, 2008,
Beijing conducted phased reduction of its road-traveling automo-
biles, primarily by restricting automobiles of government ofces,
public institutions, army and police, and enterprises in the Beijing
municipal administrative regions, and conducting the strict
Olympic trafc demand management (TDM) of odd-even day
vehicle operation since July 20, 2008 (Wu and Zhang, 2008).
Due to these TDM measures, the road-traveling automobiles
reduced about 1.95 million a day during the Olympic Games (Mao,
2008). However, the improving effect on air quality remains to be
proved. Westerdahl et al. (2008) measured the on-road and
ambient pollutant concentrations during the four-day trafc
control experiment conducted by the Beijing Government from
* Corresponding author. Tel.: 86 10 62755852/62751925; fax: 86 10 62751927.
E-mail address: sdxie@pku.edu.cn (S. Xie).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Atmospheric Environment
j ournal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ at mosenv
1352-2310/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2009.07.034
Atmospheric Environment 43 (2009) 56825690
August 17 to 20, 2007, and found it effective in reducing extreme
concentrations. In this article we intend to reveal the trafc-related
pollution during the Olympic Games, assess the air quality
improvement for the rst time by modeling, and also evaluate the
reduction effect of these trafc management measures. Based on
this intention, we focus on the air quality inside urban street
canyons, which are not only intensively polluted areas, but also
overwhelmingly inuenced by the trafc emission.
There are a few models applied to simulate the pollution in
urban streets, i.e. STREET, CPBM, CAR (Mensink and Lewyckyj,
2001; Vardoulakis et al., 2002a,b, 2003; Yamartino and Wiegand,
1986; Ha rko nen et al., 1995, 1996). We choose the Operational
Street Pollution Model (OSPM, by National Environmental Research
Institute, Denmark), as it is designed for simulating the dispersion
of particulates and gases, mainly emit from vehicles, inside the
street canyon, which can present us the micro-environment trafc
pollution situation (Berkowicz, 2000). On the other hand, this
model is simple but sufcient, even to estimate ozone concentra-
tion, as it has been validated in many countries (Berkowicz et al.,
2002; Karppinen et al., 2000; Gokhale et al., 2005; Vardoulakis
et al., 2007; Ketzel et al., 2000; Ghenu et al., 2008; Bihan et al.,
2002; Ziv et al., 2002; Kukkonen et al., 2003), including China (He
et al., 1999; Fu et al., 1999), and basically estimated the on-road
concentrations fairly well.
In the following chapters we calculate the concentrations of
PM
10
, CO, NO
2
and ozone before and during the Olympic trafc
control days. Then these simulation results, as well as the trafc
ow data, are compared to nd the air quality improvement and
the reduction effect of trafc control measures. In advance, we
validate the accuracy of OSPM in forecasting the on-road pollutant
concentrations in Beijing by comparing with the measurement
results on a representative street.
2. Methods
2.1. OSPM model
The OSPM model, developed by Hertel (1989), Hertel and Ber-
kowicz (1989), is a practical street pollution model based on
a simplied description of ow and dispersion conditions in street
canyons. Concentrations of on-road exhaust gases can be divided
into two parts: the direct contribution fromstreet trafc, computed
by a plume model; and the recirculation part of pollutants,
computed froma box model. The total receptor concentration sums
them up and adds the background concentration, caused by
emission sources other than automobiles. This simplied parame-
terization in a street canyon has been deduced from extensive
analysis of experimental data and model tests (Berkowicz et al.,
1996, 1997). In addition, the model includes the basic chemical
reactions involving NO, NO
2
, O
2
and O
3
(Kukkonen et al., 2001).
2.2. Input data
2.2.1. Trafc and emission
OSPM calculates the vehicle source emission with trafc ow
data and emission factors computed by default COPERT model.
However, the default trafc eet share le and emission factors
based on European vehicle and fuel lists may not be suitable for
Beijing. As the new version of WinOSPM accepts the total emission
le (*.TEM) provided by the user, we take this advantage, to
calculate the total emission on each selected street, based on the
Chinese trafc eet composition of 10 vehicle types, and corre-
sponding emission factors derived from researches done in China
(Xie et al., 2005, 2006; Song and Xie, 2006; Wang et al., 2001;
Fu et al., 1997, 2000; Wang and Ding, 2002; Li et al., 2003).
The Chinese eet composition types and applied emission factors
are listed in Table 1.
The hourly trafc ow data (total number of vehicles, h
1
) on
selected streets before and during Olympics are provided by
Environment Monitoring Centre, EPB Beijing. The trafc eet
composition of each street comes from on-spot survey and docu-
mentation. Additionally, we include in the trafc le the long-short
vehicle ratio to furnish the trafc induced turbulence. The average
velocities of long vehicles and short vehicles are respectively set
25.0 kmh
1
and 30.0 kmh
1
during nighttime (22:00next 06:00),
15.0 kmh
1
and 20 kmh
1
in daytime (06:0022:00). In this paper
the cold-start emission is not taken into account.
2.2.2. Meteorology and background
Wind speed and wind direction are the most important
meteorological factors, which inuence the whole dispersion
mode and ambient turbulence. Temperature and total solar
radiation are needed as input values for the chemical reaction
(Hertel, 1989; Hertel and Berkowicz, 1989). Furthermore, the
meteorology and background data le contains the hourly
measured concentrations, for comparison, of PM
10
(mg m
3
) CO
(mg m
3
) and NO
2
(mg m
3
). As done in many researches (Chan
and Yao, 2008; Guinot et al., 2006; Chan et al., 2005; Song et al.,
2006), we apply the measurement values in Ding Ling Tomb,
a national monitoring site in rural area, as background concen-
trations. These hourly meteorology and measurement data is all
from Beijing Meteorology Bureau and Environment Monitoring
Centre, EPB Beijing. As ozone is not an ofcially monitored
species on national monitoring sites, the O
3
background
concentration comes from measurement in Beijing Iron Tower (a
regional background monitoring site) by Atmospheric Physics
Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
2.2.3. Streets geometry
Street conguration is also an important parameter for the
dispersion computation. We selected 12 avenues as the targets of
evaluation, from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th ring roads around Beijing
urban area, covering East, West, South and North sides on each ring
road. These streets are all expressways and arterial roads, with
steady trafc ow and available measurement data. The main
trafc network of Beijing, including 2nd6th ring roads, is shown in
Fig. 1 and the selected 12 avenues are coloured in white. The names
and orientations of these streets are presented in Table 2.
The street geometry data, including the average height of the
buildings, the width and the length of each street, are totally
from on-site measurement. The receptor height sets at 2 m. The
orientation of roads on East and West sides is regulated at 180
north, and 90
54
0
06
00
N/116
23
0
57
00
E) to Zhen-
gyi road (39
53
0
58
00
N/116
24
0
00
00
E), with the length 529 m, width
62.5 mand orientation 6.5