UK-Taiwan Collaboration on Transport and Deposition of Air Pollution over the South China Sea

Economies in South East Asia are developing rapidly leading to rapidly growing emissions of a variety of important chemicals including halocarbon compounds that can impact the ozone layer and nutrients and contaminants that can alter ocean biological processes. These emissions are carried towards the Pacific Ocean mixing with dust from the Asian deserts. The subsequent deposition of this material can impact on ocean productivity and the transport of ozone damaging chemicals southwards allows them to enter the equatorial region with rapid transfer to the stratosphere with attendant threats to stratospheric ozone. A recently developed Taiwanese sampling station offers an ideal location to study this Asian outflow as it starts its journey and hence to better understand its current and potential future impacts in the region and globally. This grant aims to develop links between a leading UK research group and colleagues in Taiwan in preparation for a major grant application for fields studies in this region.

SE Asia is a region of remarkably rapid economic growth with associated rapid growth in emissions. The pattern of those emissions are also changing rapidly with developing patterns of fuel and resource use changing in different countries as they develop. As demonstrated in the proposal, these emissions are already having regional and global scale environmental impacts and we need to understand these to allow predictions of their future impacts. Such understanding requires fundamental knowledge of the nature and the outflow which can only be obtained from field measurements. Collaborations with Taiwanese partners offers access to an ideally located field station to make such measurements which can then influence model development, quantification of the impacts of the emissions and ultimately global emission control policies.