Lekhendra Tripathee & Shichang Kang & Jie Huang &Mika Sillanpää & Chhatra Mani Sharma &Zoe Lucia Lüthi & Junming Guo & Rukumesh Paudyal

 

L. Tripathee : S. Kang (*) : J. Huang : Z. L. Lüthi : J. Guo

Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land Surface Processes, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PO Box 2871, Beijing 100101, China

e-mail: shichang.kang@itpcas.ac.cn

L. Tripathee : Z. L. Lüthi : J. Guo

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

S. Kang

State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China

L. Tripathee : J. Huang :M. Sillanpää : C. M. Sharma : J. Guo

Laboratory of Green Chemistry, Lappeenranta University ofTechnology, Mikkeli, Finland

C. M. Sharma

Human and Natural Resources Studies Centre, KathmanduUniversity, PO Box 6250, Kathmandu, Nepal

R. Paudyal

School of Environmental Science and Management, PokharaUniversity, Pokhara, Nepa

 

 

Abstract Severe atmospheric pollution transported to Himalayas from South Asia may affect fragile ecosystem and can be harmful for human health in the region. In order to understand the atmospheric chemistry in the southern slope of

central Himalayas, where the data is limited, precipitation has been sampled at four sites: Kathmandu (1,314 m), Dhunche (2, 065 m), Dimsa (3,078 m), and Gosainkunda (4,417 m) in Nepal for over a 1-year period characterized by an urban, rural, and remote sites, respectively. HCO3− is the dominant anion, while the NH4+ is the dominant cation in precipitation at the four sites.Generally, most of ions (e.g., SO42−, NO3−, NH4+, HCO3−, and Ca2+) have higher concentrations in urban site compared to the rural sites. Neutralization factor calculation showed that precipitation in the region is highly neutralized by NH4+ and Ca2+. Empirical orthogonal function and correlation analysis indicated that the precipitation chemistry was mostly influenced by crustal, anthropogenic, and marine sources in Nepal. Among different sites, urban area was mostly influenced by anthropogenic inputs and crustal dusts, whereas remote sites were mostly from marine and crustal sources. Seasonal variations show higher ionic concentrations during non-monsoon seasons mainly due to limited precipitation amount. On the other hand, lower ionic concentrations were observed during monsoon season when higher amount of precipitation washes out aerosols. Thus, precipitation chemistry from this work can provide a useful database to evaluate atmospheric environment and its impacts on ecosystem in the southern slope of central Himalayas, Nepal.

Keywords Major ions . Precipitation . Seasonal variation .Spatial variations . Nepal . Central Himalayas