Impact of SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic Lockdown on Air Quality Using Satellite Imagery with Ground Station Monitoring Data in Mos

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Impact of SARS‑CoV‑2 Pandemic Lockdown on Air Quality Using Satellite Imagery with Ground Station Monitoring Data in Most Polluted City Kolkata, India Sabyasachi Kabiraj1   · Nitin Vyankat Gavli2 Received: 25 July 2020 / Revised: 3 October 2020 / Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy Sciences 2020

Abstract Immediate lockdown (March 24–May 31, 2020) of industrial activity and traffic flows has been announced by the government of India across the country after the declaration of World Health Organization that the Novel Coronavirus (SARSCoV-2) outbreak is pandemic. In this study, we tried to estimate the air quality improvement during the pre-lockdown period (January 1–March 23, 2020) by comparing the lockdown period (March 24–May 31, 2020). From the results, we found the highest reduction in the concentration of N ­ O2 (81.98%) during the lockdown period. The average concentration of N ­ O2 was 51.57 µg/m3 during pre-lockdown has changed to 9.29 µg/m3. The average ­PM2.5 concentration was 80.09 µg/m3 during the pre-lockdown period has reduced to 20.24 µg/m3 with 74.72% of reduction during the lockdown period. From the overall analysis of various parameters, we observed significant improvement with the range of 73.27–78.26% in P ­ M2.5, 69.01–82.55% in ­PM10, 72.12–87.62% in NO2, 18.61–63.19% in ­SO2 and 47.16–72.11% in CO with the highest improvements in Ballygunge, Rabindra Bharati University, Ballygunge, Bidhannagar, Rabindra Sarobar and Rabindra Bharati University, respectively, with an overall average reduction in air pollutants of 53.61%. Reduction in the concentration of ­PM2.5, ­PM10, CO, N ­ O2 and ­SO2 is mainly due to the closure of on-road vehicle emission, industrial activities, shut down of malls, shops etc. This reduced level of air pollutants may help in the modification of all the environmental policies for better air quality in future. Keywords  Air pollution · SARS-CoV-2 · NO2 · PM2.5 · PM10

1 Introduction On 29th December 2019, at Wuhan city, the capital of Hubei Province in China a new infectious disease (COVID-19) was first identified (Huang et al. 2020; Zhou et al. 2020a, b) and then it spread all over the world. More than 11,635,939 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 539,026 deaths, reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). In the USA, the number of confirmed cases is more than 2 million and death cases are about 1,29,963. The other worstaffected countries such as Brazil (1,623,284 cases with 65,487 deaths), Russia (694,230 cases with 10,494 deaths), * Sabyasachi Kabiraj [email protected] 1



Department of Civil Engineering, Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India



Department of Geography, University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

2

UK (285,772 cases with 44,236 deaths), Italy (241,819 cases with 34,869 deaths), France (159,568 cases with 29,831), Spain (251,789 cases with 28,388 deaths) and Mexico (261,750 cases with 31,119 deaths) have reported to WHO. The first case reported in India on January 30