Air quality in the New Delhi metropolis under COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

Air pollution has been on continuous rise with increase in industrialization in metropolitan cities of the world. Several measures including strict climate laws and reduction in the number of vehicles were implemented by several nations. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a great opportunity to understand the daily human activities effect on air pollution. Majority nations restricted industrial activities and vehicular traffic to a large extent as a measure to restrict COVID-19 spread. In this paper, we analyzed the impact of such COVID19-induced lockdown on the air quality of the city of New Delhi, India. We analyzed the average concentration of common gaseous pollutants viz. sulfur dioxide (SO), ozone (O), nitrogen dioxide (NO), and carbon monoxide (CO). These concentrations were obtained from the tropospheric column of Sentinel-5P (an earth observation satellite of European Space Agency) data. We observed that the city observed a significant drop in the level of atmospheric pollutant’s concentration for all the major pollutants as a result of strict lockdown measure. Such findings are also validated with pollutant data obtained from ground based monitoring stations. We observed that near-surface pollutant concentration dropped significantly by 50% for PM2.5, 71.9% for NO, and 88% for CO, after the lockdown period. Such studies would pave the path for implementing future air pollution control measures by environmentalists.