Abstract
In early 2020 from April to early June, the metropolitan area of Sydney as well as the rest of New South Wales (NSW, Australia) experienced a period of lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus in the community. The effect of reducing anthropogenic activities including transportation had an impact on the urban environment in terms of air quality which is shown to have improved for a number of pollutants, such as Nitrogen Dioxides (NO2) and Carbon Monoxide (CO), based on monitoring data on the ground and from a satellite. In addition to primary pollutants CO and NOx emitted from mobile sources, PM2.5 (primary and secondary) and secondary Ozone (O3) during the lockdown period will also be analyzed using both statistical methods on air quality data and the modelling method with emission and meteorological data input to an air quality model. By estimating the decrease in traffic volume in the Sydney region, the corresponding decrease in emission input to the Weather Research and Forecasting—Community Multiscale Air Quality Modelling System (WRF-CMAQ) air quality model is then used to estimate the effect of lockdown on the air quality especially CO, NO2, O3, and PM2.5 in the Greater Metropolitan Region (GMR) of Sydney. The results from both statistical and modelling methods show that NO2, CO, and PM2.5 levels decreased during the lockdown, but O3 instead increased. However, the change in the concentration levels are small considering the large reduction of ~30% in traffic volume.
Highlights
We focus on the effect of lockdown on air quality in the Greater Metropolitan Region (GMR) of Sydney from April to June 2020, on criteria pollutants
We suggest that the improvement trend based on the air quality data from January to May in 2020 and in previous years in their work is due to the improvement in the emission and masked the small improvement in 2020 due to the COVID-19 lockdown
Our study shows that the linear regression trend method cannot be used to detect the effect of the short lockdown period due to the change in emission using an interannual comparison of trend unless the intra-annual effect or seasonal meteorological change is taken into account
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has caused death and economic misery in all countries of the world. The disease was named as Coronavirus Diseases 2019 (COVID-19). By WHO and is caused by a type of coronavirus strain called Severe Acute Respiratory. Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [1]. It is not as deadly in terms of death statistics as the 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic but it is unprecedented in the rapid transmission of viral agents from human to human around the world [2]. Starting in the city of Wuhan, China in late December, in a few months most corners of the world was affected by the pandemic due to the highly contagious nature of the virus and the rapid transmission was helped by the extensive global connectivity in our age as compared to previous times
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