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Significant reduced traffic in Beijing failed to relieve haze pollution during the COVID-19 lockdown: implications for haze mitigation

The COVID-19 outbreak greatly limited human activities and reduced primary emissions particularly from urban on-road vehicles, but coincided with Beijing experiencing pandemic haze, raising the public concerns of the validity and effectiveness of the imposed traffic policies to improve the air pollution. Here, we explored the relationship between local vehicle emissions and the winter haze in Beijing before and during the COVID-19 lockdown period based on an integrated analysis framework, which combines a real-time on-road emission inventory, in-situ air quality observations and a localized chemical transport modeling system. We found that traffic emissions decreased substantially affected by the pandemic, with a higher reduction for NOx (75.9%, 125.3 Mg/day) compared to VOCs (53.1%, 52.9 Mg/day). Unexpectedly, our results show that the imbalanced emission abatement of NOx and VOCs from vehicles led to a significant rise of the atmospheric oxidizing capacity in urban areas, but only resulting in modest increases in secondary aerosols due to the inadequate precursors. However, the enhanced oxidizing capacity in the surrounding regions greatly increased the secondary particles with relatively abundant precursors, which is mainly responsible for Beijing haze during the lockdown period. Our results indicate that the winter haze in Beijing was insensitive to the local vehicular emissions reduction due to the complicated nonlinear response of the fine particle and air pollutant emissions. We suggest mitigation policies should focus on accelerating VOC and NH3 emissions reduction and synchronously controlling regional sources to release the benefits on local traffic emission control.