Estimating the Impact of COVID-19 on the PM_2.5 Levels in China with a Satellite-Driven Machine Learning Model

China implemented an aggressive nationwide lockdown procedure immediately after the COVID-19 outbreak in January 2020. As China emerges from the impact of COVID-19 on national economic and industrial activities, it has become the site of a large-scale natural experiment to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on regional air quality. However, ground measurements of fine particulate matters (PM_2.5) concentrations do not offer comprehensive spatial coverage, especially in suburban and rural regions. In this study, we developed a machine learning method with satellite aerosol remote sensing data, meteorological fields and land use parameters as major predictor variables to estimate spatiotemporally resolved daily PM_2.5 concentrations in China. Our study period consists of a reference semester (1 November 2018-30 April 2019) and a pandemic semester (1 November 2019-30 April 2020), with six modeling months in each semester. Each period was then divided into subperiod 1 (November and December), subperiod 2 (January and February) and subperiod 3 (March and April). The reference semester model obtained a 10-fold cross-validated R² (RMSE) of 0.79 (17.55 μg/m³) and the pandemic semester model obtained a 10-fold cross-validated R² (RMSE) of 0.83 (13.48 μg/m³) for daily PM_2.5 predictions. Our prediction results showed high PM_2.5 concentrations in the North China Plain, Yangtze River Delta, Sichuan Basin and Xinjiang Autonomous Region during the reference semester. PM_2.5 levels were lowered by 4.8 μg/m³ during the pandemic semester compared to the reference semester and PM_2.5 levels during subperiod 2 decreased most, by 18%. The southeast region was affected most by the COVID-19 outbreak with PM_2.5 levels during subperiod 2 decreasing by 31%, followed by the Northern Yangtze River Delta (29%) and Pearl River Delta (24%).