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This study has been performed to select several indicators of long-range transport process that can be applied to the Northeast Asia. We first classified high air pollution days into long-range transport (LRT) dominant cases and the local emission dominant (LED) cases based on the synoptic meteorological variables including vorticity and geostrophic wind speed/direction at a geopotential level of 850 hPa. LRT cases were further categorized into two types: LRT-I type with air mass pathways from northern China and/or Mongolia, and LRT-II type from central and southern China. In each categorized case, we examined the difference of both measured aerosol optical properties of AERONET at two sites in western Korea, and the simulated characteristics of LRT process by MM5-CMAQ model. We contrasted LRT case with LED case, and then generated the LRT indicators applicable to Northeast Asia. The results showed that fine and coarse modes of LRT-II were relatively smaller than LED and LRT-I cases, respectively. Aerosol size distribution showed significantly higher concentration of fine-mode particle (mainly smoke or urban aerosols) in LED case in comparison with that of LRT groups (LRT-I, II), suggesting the amplitudes fine modes of LRT relative to LED as a possible LRT indicator. From the results of MM5-CMAQ modeling, we concluded that the conversion ratios for sulfur (Fₛ) were the most effective indicators of LRT cases, and the ratio of VOC to NOx and NOx to CO were found to be the second most effective indicators of LED case.
Park et al. (Thu,) studied this question.