Long-range transport of soil dust and smoke pollution in the South Asian region

Transboundary transport of air pollution in the South Asian region has been an issue of increasing importance over the past several decades. Long-range transport of anthropogenic pollution is contrasted with that of pollution produced by natural processes such as dust storms or natural forest fires. Airborne particulate matter datasets covering the period from 2002 to 2007 from the neighboring countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were used to find the source areas that are primarily responsible for long range transported pollutants. All four countries collected samples with the same type of sampler and follow the same technique for mass and BC measurements. It was found that high fine soil contributions were from dust storms. On the other hand, smoke in this region mainly comes from northern India where agricultural waste is often burned. (C) Author(s) 2011. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.