Study on particulate matter air pollution in Beijing with MODIS aerosol level 2 products

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Chinese government officials at both the central and municipal levels are keenly aware that they must transform Beijing into a world-class city. According to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau (BJEPB) to improve its air quality some actions are adopting, including taking steps to increase the forested area surrounding the city preventing dust storms, reducing the automotive vehicles, moving polluting factories now inside the fourth ring road ringing the inner city to locations outside of the fourth ring road, and switching the fuel of public buses and taxis from diesel to natural gas, etc. Will they eliminate most serious environmental problems in Beijing? MODIS aerosol products are helping us to answer this kind of questions. A longterm validation has been finished by sun-photometer observations, and the results proved the relative error of MODIS level 2 products was slightly larger than the estimation of Chu et al. (2002) from the results in most AERONET sites. However, the comparison between the products and moisture-corrected air pollution index (API) data, which were daily released to public by EPB, showed a high correlation coefficient. An air pollution episode in 2003 was investigated by the usage of satellite products. Our conclusion for the air pollution control strategy in Beijing is that only reducing the pollution sources from inner city can't fully solve the pollution problems in Beijing and the regional transports from the nearby southern provinces are contributing a lot to the pollution situation in Beijing.