To quantitatively study the impact of short-duration high-strength human tourism activities on urban air quality, a novel model (EEMD-DCCA) integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) was proposed and applied to study the impact of the number of tourists in Wulingyuan scenic spot of Zhangjiajie on local atmospheric NO₂ concentration in 2015. The high-frequency components of the number of tourists in Wulingyuan scenic spot and the concentration of NO₂ in Zhangjiajie City were obtained firstly through EEMD. And then, DCCA method was used to analyze the correlation between high-frequency components of the number of tourists and NO₂ concentration. The results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the two groups of the high-frequency components of the tourist number and NO₂ concentration in Zhangjiajie, and the positive correlation has a long-term sustainability feature, which means that the rapid increase of the number of tourists in short-duration holidays will continue to affect the future change trend of NO₂ concentration in a certain time scale. The research in Wulingyuan scenic area shows that the model proposed can provide a new research approach for quantitative assessment of the impact of tourism activities on the air quality of natural scenic spots.