Atmospheric pollution from ships and its impact on local air quality at a port site in Shanghai

Growing shipping activities in port areas have generated negative impacts on climate, air quality and human health. To better evaluate the environmental impact of ship emissions, an experimental characterization of air pollution from ships was conducted in Shanghai Port in the summer of 2016. The ambient concentrations of gaseous NO, NO2, SO2 and O3 in addition to fine particulate matter concentrations (PM2.5), particle size distributions and the chemical composition of individual particles from ship emission were continuously monitored for 3 months. Ship emission plumes were visible at the port site in terms of clear peaks in the gaseous species and particulate matter concentrations. The SO2 and vanadium particle numbers were found to correlate best with ship emissions in Shanghai Port. Single-particle data showed that ship emission particles at the port site mainly concentrated in a smaller size range (<0.4 µm), where their number contributions were more important than their mass contributions to ambient particulate matter. The composition of ship emission particles at the port site suggested that they were mostly freshly emitted particles: their mass spectra were dominated by peaks of sulfate, elemental carbon (EC), and trace metals such as V, Ni, Fe and Ca, in addition to displaying very low nitrate signals. The gaseous NOx composition in some cases of plumes showed evidence of atmospheric transformation by ambient O3, which subsequently resulted in O3 depletion in the area. Quantitative estimations in this study showed that ship emissions contributed 36.4 % to SO2, 0.7 % to NO, 5.1 % to NO2, −0.9 % to O3, 5.9 % to PM2.5 and 49.5 % to vanadium particles in the port region if land-based emissions were included, and 57.2 % to SO2, 71.9 % to NO, 30.4 % to NO2, −16.6 % to O3, 27.6 % to PM2.5 and 77.0 % to vanadium particles if land-based emissions were excluded.