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Geospatial View of Air Pollution and Health Risk Over North Indian Region in COVID-19 Scenario

ABSTRACT: Air pollutant concentration, air quality index (AQI), and Excess risk (ER%) is assessed during January 2020 to June 2021 and in three scenarios including pre-lockdown, lockdown and post-lockdown based on 47 ground station data (during January 2020 to June 2020) distributed over northern part of India (including Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, part of Uttar Pradesh, and part of Rajasthan) using statistics and geographic information system (GIS) techniques. Daily and monthly variations of air pollutants (During January 2020 to June 2021) over the region showed a systematic pattern with high pollutant level during October and November while low during March, April (in dry period) and July–September (in wet period). In three scenarios viz. pre, during and post-lockdown the average concentration for PM2.5 was 71.1 ± 45 µg/m3, 39 ± 20 µg/m3 and 40 + 17 µg/m3, for PM10 was 139 ± 72 µg/m3, 96 ± 55 µg/m3 and 105 ± 57 µg/m3, for NO2 was 28 ± 21 µg/m3, 17 ± 13 µg/m3 and 18 ± 12 µg/m3, for NH3 was 33 ± 24 µg/m3, 25 ± 18 µg/m3 and 29 ± 22 µg/m3, for CO was 1 ± 0.65 mg/m3, 0.7 ± 0.5 mg/m3, and 0.7 ± 0.5 mg/m3, for O3 was 29 ± 20 µg/m3, 39 ± 23 µg/m3 and 39 ± 22 µg/m3 and for SO2 was 14 ± 11 µg/m3, 14 ± 12 µg/m3 and 12.5 ± 8.9 µg/m3. Significant decrease in mean pollutants concentration, AQI and ER % was observed in lockdown period amid COVID-19. PM2.5, PM10, NO2, NH3 and CO decreased by 46%, 31%, 39%, 24% and 34%, respectively, in lockdown scenario as compared to the pre-lockdown scenario while the O3 get increased. A decrease of 39% in AQI was observed as compared to pre-lockdown scenario; however, the difference was less when compared with post-lockdown scenario. The decrease in total ER% was 60.36% over the study area due to improvement in air quality over the region amid COVID-19 lockdown. The meteorological conditions in 2020 were found consistent with respect to 2019 and very less influence was observed on the concentration of air pollutants (less r2 among the pollutants and meteorological parameters).

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12524-022-01520-z.

SUBMITTER: Singh D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8867459 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The outbreak of COVID-19 has spreaded rapidly across the world. To control the rapid dispersion of the virus, China has imposed national lockdown policies to practise social distancing. This has led to reduced human activities and hence primary air pollutant emissions, which caused improvement of air quality as a side-product. To investigate the air quality changes during the COVID-19 lockdown over the YRD Region, we apply the WRF-CAMx modelling system together with monitoring data to investigate the impact of human activity pattern changes on air quality. Results show that human activities were lowered significantly during the period: industrial operations, VKT, constructions in operation, etc. were significantly reduced, leading to lowered SO2, NOx, PM2.5 and VOCs emissions by approximately 16-26%, 29-47%, 27-46% and 37-57% during the Level I and Level II response periods respectively. These emission reduction has played a significant role in the improvement of air quality. Concentrations of PM2.5, NO2 and SO2 decreased by 31.8%, 45.1% and 20.4% during the Level I period; and 33.2%, 27.2% and 7.6% during the Level II period compared with 2019. However, ozone did not show any reduction and increased greatly. Our results also show that even during the lockdown, with primary emissions reduction of 15%-61%, the daily average PM2.5 concentrations range between 15 and 79 μg m-3, which shows that background and residual pollutions are still high. Source apportionment results indicate that the residual pollution of PM2.5 comes from industry (32.2-61.1%), mobile (3.9-8.1%), dust (2.6-7.7%), residential sources (2.1-28.5%) in YRD and 14.0-28.6% contribution from long-range transport coming from northern China. This indicates that in spite of the extreme reductions in primary emissions, it cannot fully tackle the current air pollution. Re-organisation of the energy and industrial strategy together with trans-regional joint-control for a full long-term air pollution plan need to be further taken into account.

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Geospatial View of Air Pollution and Health Risk Over North Indian Region in COVID-19 Scenario

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