Direction 1：Distribution, history of black carbon and their climate effect
Multi-discipline techniques, including systematic observation, analytical method development, record re-construction, and numeral simulation, were integrated in our lab to enrich the fundamental understanding of black carbon climatology
Direction 2：Physical and chemical characterization of Asian dust and their environmental effect
Mineral dust is one of the major components of atmospheric aerosol, and has large impacts on the global radiation balance, cloud physics, heterogeneous chemistry of reactive gases and global biogeochemical cycle. The deserts and Gobi in north and northwest China are the second largest global atmospheric dust source with annual emissions of about 800 Tgt yr−1. Characterizing the physical and chemical properties of Asian dust and evaluate their impacts on climate and environment is a traditional direction of our group.
Direction 3：Source, chemical composition, spatial distribution, and temporal variation of organic aerosols
Multi-discipline techniques were adopted to characterize the spatial and temporal variations of organic aerosols in East Asia. The formation mechanism of organic aerosols and their potential climate effect were also discussed. In the past five years we have published 48 peer-reviewed SCI journal (including ACP, EST, and JGR) articles and their citation counts reached 380. Our work on organic aerosols from 14 cities in China has been recognized by EST editors as “the most comprehensive study yet of organic pollutants in Chinese urban air…”
Direction 4：PM2.5 distribution, sources, health effect and air pollution control
Our results revealed that the severe haze pollution event was driven to a large extent by secondary aerosol formation, which contributed 30–77 per cent and 44–71 per cent (average for all four cities) of PM2.5 and of organic aerosol, respectively. Our results highlight that reducing the emissions of secondary aerosol precursors is likely to be important for controlling China’s PM2.5 levels (Huang et al., 2014, nature).
