Paper on pollution impact from the February 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in China published in Geophysical Research Letters

Figure. Change in pollution over China for February 2020. Observed values (left), expected values if there were no COVID-19 perturbation (center), and their difference (right) are shown for nitrogen dioxide (top) aerosol optical depth (middle), and cloud droplet effective radius (bottom). Shading is such that lighter (left and center) and greener (right) colors align with what would be expected for less pollution.

Our new paper analyzing the effect of China’s strict shutdown measures put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19 on pollution levels and cloud properties was just published in the the American Geophysical Union’s special collection on The COVID-19 Pandemic: Linking Health, Society, and Environment.

The paper is freely available.

For more information, the University of Washington put out a press release and I was recently interviewed by Forbes about this work. I also wrote about our results and provided links to my “iPosters” virtually presented at the JpGU-AGU Joint Meeting and a special World Meteorological Organization workshop, previously on this site.

Update from July 20, 2021: Our paper was one of the top 10% most downloaded articles from all AGU journals in 2020!

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