Urban dust in the Guanzhong Basin of China, part I: A regional distribution of dust sources retrieved using satellite data

Urban dust pollution has been becoming an outstanding environmental problem due to rapid urbanization in China. However, it is very difficult to construct an urban dust inventory, owing to its small horizontal scale and strong temporal/spatial variability. With the analysis of visual interpretation, maximum likelihood classification, extrapolation and spatial overlaying, we quantified dust source distributions of urban constructions, barrens and croplands in the Guanzhong Basin using various satellite data, including VHR (0.5 m), Lansat-8 OLI (30 m) and MCD12Q1 (500 m). The croplands were the dominant dust sources, accounting for 40% (17,913 km²) of the study area in summer and 36% (17,913 km²) in winter, followed by barrens, accounting for 5% in summer and 10% in winter. Moreover, the total constructions were 126 km², including 84% of active and 16% inactive. In addition, 59% of the constructions aggregated on the only megacity of the study area, Xi'an. With high accuracy exceeding 88%, the proposed satellite-data based method is feasible and valuable to quantify distributions of dust sources. This study provides a new perspective to evaluate regional urban dust, which is seldom quantified and reported. In a companied paper (Part-2 of the study), the detailed distribution of the urban dust sources is applied in a dynamical/aerosol model (WRF-Dust) to assess the effect of dust sources on aerosol pollution.