Multi-scale correlation reveals the evolution of socio-natural contributions to tropospheric HCHO over China from 2005 to 2022.

Monitoring the spatiotemporal distribution of formaldehyde (HCHO) is crucial for reducing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emissions, and the long-term evolution of socio-natural sources contributions to tropospheric HCHO over China is still unclear. We propose an oversampling algorithm for quantitatively tracking the evolution of uncertainty, which lowers the uncertainty of the original Level 2 OMI HCHO data (50 % -105 %) to 0-50 %, and then we examine the evolution of contributions from various emissions sources applying multi-scale correlation. We found that the high formaldehyde vertical column densities (VCD) caused by human activities in eastern China are crossing the Hu Huanyong Line, which was formerly used to demarcate the population distribution. National-scale analysis indicate that HCHO VCD are significantly correlated with per capita Gross Domestic Product (per capita GDP) (r = 0.948) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (r = 0.864), while no substantial correlation with land surface temperature (LST) (r = 0.233). A valuable finding at city-scale is that the vast majority of cities exhibits clear latitude zoning characteristics in the correlation between HCHO VCD and per capita GDP. Diagnosis at pixel scale reveals that anthropogenic emissions continue to weaken the contributions of emissions caused by the increase in vegetation proportion. NDVI = 0.8 is the critical characteristic point where the contribution of natural source exceeds that of anthropogenic sources, while the point presents a decreasing trend in recent years due to the enhancement of human activities levels. Rise in LST over vegetation areas show positive driving effect on formaldehyde emissions, but continuous urbanization is diminishing this contribution. NDVI = 0.8 is a characteristic point to determine whether the contribution proportion of regional surface temperature to formaldehyde emissions from vegetation begun to rise. Our research identifies the evolutionary process and characteristics of the spatiotemporal distribution and socio-nature sources contributions of tropospheric formaldehyde of China from 2005 to 2022.