Abstract
Measures to contain COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan included international travel restrictions since February 2020, which resulted in a nearly 80% reduction of aviation volume at the International Taoyuan Airport (TPE), while industry and ground traffic continued to operate unaffected by the pandemic. This study attempted to assess the contribution of aviation volume to air pollution measured by a monitoring station, located 2 km southwest to the airport. We applied cluster analysis to identify TPE contribution to the major air pollutants and estimated their relationship with the number of passengers as a proxy to the flights number. From the airport containing cluster, we observed significant reduction of air pollution concentrations after the travel restrictions. The reduction percentage of SO2 and NOx was higher in the airport cluster (17.7% and 7.3%, respectively) compared to the total station observation (14.7% and 6.8% respectively). Spearman’s coefficients indicated positive significant correlations between the number of passengers and PM2.5 (0.06), PM10 (0.21), SO2 (0.24), especially after the travel restrictions. Such low correlations were found due to the distance of 2 km between the monitoring station and the airport runway. This distance could be too far to precisely detect the contribution of aviation to air pollution, which was masked by industrial activities and ground traffic. Measuring air pollution at a closer distance to the runways is required for a better catchment of aviation impact on air quality.
Highlights
Past decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth of civic aviation, with surging emission of major air pollutants, especially in Asia (Lee et al, 2021)
Monthly number of flights remarkably dropped to less than 1,000, and the numbers of passengers declined even more dramatically to about 100,000 (Fig. 2), and the numbers of flights and passengers remained strongly correlated (r > 0.90). Those changes in aviation volume were accompanied by the reduction in air pollutants concentrations
We further examined the relationships between number of passengers and air pollution concentrations in both airport cluster and the total observations
Summary
Past decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth of civic aviation, with surging emission of major air pollutants, especially in Asia (Lee et al, 2021). The aviation is one of the most energyconsuming human activities, emitting multiple air pollutants, such as particular matter < 2.5 μm (PM2.5), and < 10 μm (PM10), nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon oxide (CO), and sulphur dioxide (SO2), which contribute to the global warming and increased health risks (Harrison et al, 2015; Yim et al, 2015; Lee et al, 2021). Several studies attempted to quantify NOx emissions and other combustions products of aircraft engines near large international and small local airports (Yu et al, 2004; Carslaw et al, 2006; Psanis et al, 2017; Zaporozhets and Synylo, 2019). Since first cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were reported in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019 (WHO, 2021), the pandemic has globally disrupted multiple human activities, including the aviation. Lockdowns and slowing of economics in multiple countries revealed a side benefit
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