LAUSR

Abstract. Diurnal variation of surface PM 2.5 concentration (diurnal PM 2.5 ) could dramatically affect aerosol radiative and health impacts and can also well reflect the physical and chemical mechanisms of air pollution formation and evolution. So far, diurnal PM 2.5 and its modeling capability over East China have not been investigated and therefore are examined in this study. Based on the observations, the normalized diurnal amplitude of surface PM 2.5 concentrations averaged over East China is weakest ( ∼1.2 ) in winter and reaches  ∼1.5 in other seasons. The diurnal PM 2.5 shows the peak concentration during the night in spring and fall and during the daytime in summer. The simulated diurnal PM 2.5 with WRF-Chem and its contributions from multiple physical and chemical processes are examined in the four seasons. The simulated diurnal PM 2.5 with WRF-Chem is primarily controlled by planetary boundary layer (PBL) mixing and emission variations and is significantly overestimated against the observation during the night. This modeling bias is likely primarily due to the inefficient PBL mixing of primary PM 2.5 during the night. The simulated diurnal PM 2.5 is sensitive to the PBL schemes and vertical-layer configurations with WRF-Chem. Besides the PBL height, the PBL mixing coefficient is also found to be the critical factor determining the PBL mixing of pollutants in WRF-Chem. With reasonable PBL height, the increase in the lower limit of the PBL mixing coefficient during the night can significantly reduce the modeling biases in diurnal PM 2.5 and also the mean concentrations, particularly in the major cities of East China. It can also reduce the modeling sensitivity to the PBL vertical-layer configurations. The diurnal variation and injection height of anthropogenic emissions also play roles in simulating diurnal PM 2.5 , but the impact is relatively smaller than that from the PBL mixing. This study underscores that more efforts are needed to improve the boundary mixing process of pollutants in models with observations of PBL structure and mixing fluxes in addition to PBL height, in order to simulate reasonably the diurnal PM 2.5 over East China. The diurnal variation and injection height of anthropogenic emissions must also be included to simulate the diurnal PM 2.5 over East China.