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Regional and Urban Air Quality in East Asia: Taiwan

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Handbook of Air Quality and Climate Change

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Abstract

Taiwan is located downwind of a variety of regional sources of air pollutants transported particularly during the seasons of East Asian winter monsoon. In addition, western Taiwan is a highly populated and urbanized/industrialized area, where the air quality is subject to the influences of local air pollution. To mitigate the impacts of air pollution, a series of control strategies have been developed and enforced during the last couple of decades, which evolved conceptually from being technically oriented in the 1970s to being cost-benefit oriented since 2003. Along with the efforts in controlling air pollutants emitted from various sources, a significant improvement in air quality has been evidenced by monitoring data. Here, the time series of the ambient levels of respective criteria air pollutants in Taiwan for the period of 1996–2020 are presented. It is noteworthy that the ambient levels of O3 in all air quality districts in Taiwan have almost leveled off in the past 25 years, while all the other criteria air pollutants (PM10, PM2.5, CO, NOx, and SO2) exhibited consistently a declining trend. Moreover, the data on the chemical speciation of PM2.5 shows that the secondary aerosols (i.e., ammonium, sulfate, nitrate, and organic matter) remained the major constituents of PM2.5, which did not change significantly in the last two decades. Given the observed facts, it is inferred that the air quality in Taiwan is strongly subject to the impacts of photochemical reactions. As a result, in addition to the elevated ozone level, the production of secondary organic aerosols and ultrafine particles, as well as their impacts on atmospheric visibility, are expected to be major challenges in the near future.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the research groups that contribute with invaluable datasets of the Taiwan Aerosol Observation Project and the Chemical Speciation Program of Taiwan EPA. We also gratefully acknowledge the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration, Central Weather Bureau, and Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University, Taiwan, for their contributions of the data and figures to this chapter. This work receives financial support from the Academia Sinica under the Academia Sinica Grand Challenge Program AS-GC-110-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Charles C.-K. Chou, Shih-Chung Candice Lung & Ta-Chih Hsiao

  2. Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ta-Chih Hsiao

  3. Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan

    Chung-Te Lee

Authors
  1. Charles C.-K. Chou
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  2. Shih-Chung Candice Lung
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  3. Ta-Chih Hsiao
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  4. Chung-Te Lee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Charles C.-K. Chou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

    Hajime Akimoto

  2. National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

    Hiroshi Tanimoto

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© 2023 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Chou, C.CK., Lung, SC.C., Hsiao, TC., Lee, CT. (2023). Regional and Urban Air Quality in East Asia: Taiwan. In: Akimoto, H., Tanimoto, H. (eds) Handbook of Air Quality and Climate Change. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2760-9_71

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