Observed Decade-Long Improvement of Combustion Efficiency in the Yangtze River Delta Region in China

The ΔCO/ΔCO2 ratio is a good indicator of the combustion efficiency of carbon-containing fuels, and can be useful to assess the combustion efficiency on a regional scale. In this study, we analyzed in-situ observations of CO2 and CO concentrations from 2011 to 2021 at the Station for Observing Regional Processes of the Earth System (SORPES), in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region of eastern China, and calculated the ΔCO/ΔCO2 ratio to investigate the combustion efficiency in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region. Furthermore, we used a Lagrangian particle dispersion model WRF-FLEXPART to evaluate the contribution of each emission sources to the observed ΔCO/ΔCO2 ratio. We found that the observed ΔCO/ΔCO2 ratio showed a persistent decreasing trend of 1.0 ppb/ppm per year and decreased ~47.9% during this period, illustrating an evident improvement in the combustion efficiency in the YRD region. The improvement of the combustion efficiency is a result of China’s Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan announced in 2013. However, the decrease of ΔCO/ΔCO2 ratio slowed down from 1.3 ppb/ppm per year during 2011-2016 to 0.6 ppb/ppm per year during 2017-2021. The simulation results reveal that the slowdown of the decrease in the ΔCO/ΔCO2 ratios can be explained by the slowing improvement of combustion efficiency in steel source in the industry sector. Our results verify the effectiveness of emission reduction efforts in YRD region and highlight the necessity of long-term observations of CO2 and CO.