Abstract
ABSTRACT Concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) that exceed air quality standards affect human health and have an impact on the earth’s radiation budget. The lack of round the clock ground-based observations from a dense network of air quality stations inhibits the understanding of PM2.5’s spatio-temporal variability and the assessment of its health and climate effects. Aerosol optical depth (AOD) values retrieved from satellite based instruments can be used to derive surface PM2.5 concentrations. This study integrates Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) AOD retrievals and simulations from the Weather Research and Forecasting Model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) to determine the ground-level PM2.5 concentrations at a 36 km resolution across India. WRF-Chem simulations provide the factor relating the AOD with the PM2.5. Satellite-derived PM2.5 mass concentrations are compared with the available ground-based observations across India for the year of 2011. The results show a correlation between the satellite-derived monthly PM2.5 estimates and the ground-based observations for 15 stations in India with coefficients of 77% and diurnal scale coefficients varying from 0.45 to 0.75. The best estimations of PM2.5 mass concentrations on a spatio-temporal scale across India address various environmental issues.
Highlights
The spatial distributions of annually averaged Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) retrieved and WRF-Chem simulated Aerosol optical depth (AOD) for the year 2011 over India at the temporally collocated satellite overpass time are shown in Figs. 2(a) and 2(b), respectively
A large enhancement in the MODIS retrievals appears to be consistent with troposphere NO2 (Ghude et al, 2013a) and CO (Ghude et al, 2011; Surenderan et al, 2015) data sets, which reflects the influence of anthropogenic sources
The discrepancies between the derived and the observed concentrations could be due to the fact that most of the observation sites are situated near dense traffic areas and influenced by local emissions that are not completely resolved by the model in deriving the AODPM2.5 relationship
Summary
Mass concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) frequently exceeds beyond its air quality standards in most of the megacities in the South Asia which attracted attention of researchers for its environmental impact assessments (Li et al, 2015; Chowdhury and Dey, 2016; Chew et al, 2016; Ghude et al, 2016), regional air quality (Tiwari et al, 2012; Ali et al, 2013; Trivedi et al, 2014; Apte, 2015; Ghude et al, 2016; Parkhi et al, 2016; Srinivas et al, 2016; Balasubramanian et al, 2017) and climatic effects (Lin et al, 2013; Stocker et al, 2013; Tiwari et al, 2015; Gupta et al, 2006) including visibility during fog episodes (Ghude et al, 2017). Measurement of aerosol optical depth (AOD) from satellite platform provides an alternative tool to assess the groundlevel PM2.5 concentrations at regional and global scale but their application requires derivation of relationships between AOD and PM2.5 (Hoff and Christopher, 2009; Van Donkelaar et al, 2010; Reis et al, 2015; Chew et al, 2016; Zheng et al, 2016; Bilal et al, 2017; Yeganeh et al, 2017)
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