Heavy metal mass accumulation of urban surface dust in Shanghai city

This paper investigated heavy metal accumulative process of road dust on paved urban surfaces of Shanghai City in April, 2006. The data indicate that the surface dust load mean value for traffic area is 12.4 g/m and the range is 5.04-23.2 g/m; the mean value for the university area is 6.1 g/m with the range of 3.8-10.0 g/m. The research indicated that long duration and high intensity rainfall has the obvious reduction function to the dust particles load, but the light rain can enable it to increase. Land use and road traffic conditions are the important factors controlling "source-sink" effect of surface dust particulate emission. Dust load buildup occurs and the particles become coarser over the dry days. In high-traffic flow area, the dust displays "source effect" on atmospheric particulate with heavy metal concentration decreasing, while in low-traffic area, the dust displays "sink effect" on atmospheric particulate with heavy metal concentration increasing. The results also show that over the dry days, with S-type growth tendency, pollutant load depends on the couple-variation of dust load and pollutant concentrations. After the rainfall, the rate of accumulation of heavy metal load remain slow within 10 days, and during the following period of 5 days, pollution load increase rapidly. Then after 15 days, the load accumulation rate of heavy metal decrease due to the equilibrium of dust deposition and emission.