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As the largest independent east–west-trending mountain in the world, Mt. Tianshan exerts crucial impacts on climate and pollutant distributions in central Asia. Here, the vertical structures of meteorological elements and black carbon (BC) were first derived at Mt. Tianshan using an unmanned aerial vehicle system (UAVS). Vertical changes in meteorological elements can directly affect the structure of the planet boundary layer (PBL). As such, the influences of topography and meteorological elements' vertical structure on aerosol distributions were explored from observations and model simulations. The mass concentrations of BC changed slightly with the increasing height below 2300 m above sea level (a.s.l.), which significantly increased with the height between 2300–3500 m a.s.l. and contrarily decreased with ascending altitude higher than 3500 m. Topography and mountain–valley winds were found to play important roles in the distributions of aerosols and BC. The prevailing valley winds in the daytime were conducive to pollutant transport from surrounding cities to Mt. Tianshan, where the aerosol number concentration and BC mass concentration increased rapidly, whereas the opposite transport pattern dominated during nighttime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]