Influence of coal-based thermal power plants on the spatial–temporal variability of tropospheric NO 2 column over India

Abstract

The oxides of nitrogen--NO(x) (NO and NO(2))--are an important constituent of the troposphere. The availability of relatively higher spatial (0.25° grid) and temporal (daily) resolution data from ozone monitoring instrument (OMI) onboard Aura helps us to better differentiate between the point sources such as thermal power plants from large cities and rural areas compared to previous sensors. The annual and seasonal (summer and winter) distributions shows very high mean tropospheric NO(2) in specific pockets over India especially over the Indo-Gangetic plains (up to 14.2 × 10(15) molecules/cm(2)). These pockets correspond with the known locations of major thermal power plants. The tropospheric NO(2) over India show a large seasonal variability that is also observed in the ground NO(2) data. The multiple regression analysis show that the influence of a unit of power plant (in gigawatts) over tropospheric NO(2) (×10(15) molecules/cm(2)) is around ten times compared to a unit of population (in millions) over India. The OMI data show that the NO(2) increases by 0.794 ± 0.12 (×10(15) molecules/cm(2); annual) per GW compared to a previous estimate of 0.014 (×10(15) molecules/cm(2)) over India. The increase of tropospheric NO(2) per gigawatt is found to be 1.088 ± 0.18, 0.898 ± 0.14, and 0.395 ± 0.13 (×10(15) molecules/cm(2)) during winter, summer, and monsoon seasons, respectively. The strong seasonal variation is attributed to the enhancement or suppression of NO(2) due to various controlling factors which is discussed here. The recent increasing trend (2005-2007) over rural thermal power plants pockets like Agori and Korba is due to recent large capacity additions in these regions.