Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns led to a sharp drop in
socio-economic activities in China in 2020, including reductions in fossil
fuel use, industry productions, and traffic volumes. The short-term impacts
of lockdowns on China's air quality have been measured and reported,
however, the changes in anthropogenic emissions have not yet been assessed
quantitatively, which hinders our understanding of the causes of the air
quality changes during COVID-19. Here, for the first time, we report the
anthropogenic air pollutant emissions from mainland China by using a
bottom-up approach based on the near-real-time data in 2020 and use the
estimated emissions to simulate air quality changes with a chemical
transport model. The COVID-19 lockdown was estimated to have reduced China's
anthropogenic emissions substantially between January and March in 2020,
with the largest reductions in February. Emissions of SO2, NOx,
CO, non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs), and primary PM2.5 were estimated to have decreased by
27 %, 36 %, 28 %, 31 %, and 24 %, respectively, in February 2020
compared to the same month in 2019. The reductions in anthropogenic
emissions were dominated by the industry sector for SO2 and PM2.5
and were contributed to approximately equally by the industry and
transportation sectors for NOx, CO, and NMVOCs. With the spread of
coronavirus controlled, China's anthropogenic emissions rebounded in April
and since then returned to the comparable levels of 2019 in the second half
of 2020. The provinces in China have presented nearly synchronous decline
and rebound in anthropogenic emissions, while Hubei and the provinces
surrounding Beijing recovered more slowly due to the extension of lockdown
measures. The ambient air pollution presented much lower concentrations
during the first 3 months in 2020 than in 2019 while rapidly returning to comparable levels afterward, which have been reproduced by the air
quality model simulation driven by our estimated emissions. China's monthly
anthropogenic emissions in 2020 can be accessed from
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5214920.v2 (Zheng et al., 2021) by
species, month, sector, and province.