Satellite and Model Observations of the Impact of Dust and Biomass Burning On Air Quality over a Pristine Location
Tiwari S, Devara PCS, Sharma PB, Beig G and Murthy BS
Published on: 2022-12-10
Abstract
The world has been constantly witnessing a wide variety of disasters due to natural and anthropogenic activities, both in terms of economy and environmental health. The air quality in polluted cities like Delhi NCR has returned to lower levels of PM2.5, touching the lowest ever at 5 micro gram per cubic meter at earth station at Amity University Gurugram, which is situated at Panchgaon, a rural location, far away from Delhi NCR (an urban megacity). Moreover, the pollution levels over these stations are often influenced by the surrounding dust storm and stubble burning activities. To understand better these features, we analyzed the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 5P Tropomi satellite data. The results clearly point out that the amount of global NOx, SOx and CO2 have come down considerably. It is also observed that pollution levels in Delhi and in NCR have been reduced drastically. Under these improved environmental conditions, increase in concentration of Nitrogen compounds on certain experimental days have been recorded by the Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Station (AQMS), operating at Amity University Haryana (AUH), Panchgaon, Manesar due to the combined effect of crop-waste burning dust storm activities. This sudden increase in concentration of Nitrogen compounds during the lockdown epoch is attributed to the crop-waste burning and dust storm activities during the lockdown period, otherwise, there was no reason for NO2, SO2 and CO Compounds to show the marked fluctuations. This scenario was supported by fire count from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) Satellite Imageries, processed by National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF-IMD-MoES) for India and the air mass back trajectories, obtained by Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) Model–NOAA. Furthermore, the AQMS-observed local dust outbreak observed during the same period has been explained using the DREAM-DUST and HYSPLIT Models.