COVID-19 Pandemic and City-Level Nitrogen Dioxide (NO 2 ) Reduction for Urban Centres of India
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
COVID-19 Pandemic and City-Level Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Reduction for Urban Centres of India Asfa Siddiqui1
•
Suvankar Halder1 • Prakash Chauhan1 • Pramod Kumar1
Received: 28 May 2020 / Accepted: 15 July 2020 Ó Indian Society of Remote Sensing 2020
Abstract Air pollution poses a grave health risk and is a matter of concern for researchers around the globe. Toxic pollutants like nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is a result of industrial and transport sector emissions and need to be analysed at the current scenario. After the world realised the effect of COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the globe proposed complete lockdown to contain the spread. The present research focuses on analysing the gaseous pollution scenarios, before and during lockdown through satellite (Sentinel-5P data sets) and ground-based measurements (Central Pollution Control Board’s Air Quality Index, AQI) for 8 five-million plus cities in India (Delhi, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru and Pune). The long-term exposure to NO2 was also linked to pandemic-related mortality cases across the country. An average of 46% reduction in average NO2 values and 27% improvement in AQI was observed in the eight cities during the first lockdown phase with respect to pre-lockdown phase. Also, 53% of Corona positive cases and 61% of fatality cases were observed in the eight major cities of the country alone, coinciding with locations having high long-term NO2 exposure. Keywords COVID-19 Air pollution NO2 India Lockdown
Introduction The most recently discovered coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a global public health emergency on January 30, 2020, and a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, by the World Health Organization (2020). As indicated, the contagious nature of the virus is a matter of grave concern worldwide and has shown a manifold increase since its inception in Wuhan, Hubei province in China (Read et al. 2014). When the first COVID-19 patient was diagnosed in India on January 30, 2020, the world had already crossed the count of 8096 cases worldwide, i.e. more than the cases associated with severe respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 (WHO 2004). COVID-19 is a respiratory disorder accompanied by symptoms of fever, dry cough and breathing difficulty subsequently. The virus was not previously associated with disease in humans; & Asfa Siddiqui [email protected] 1
Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Indian Space Research Organisation, Dehradun, Uttarakhand 248001, India
hence, it is also known as novel coronavirus or SARSCoV-2. Some factors responsible for the susceptibility to novel coronavirus are diagnosed as history of diabetes, heart ailments, exposure to smoking and hypertension (Jiang et al. 2020; Rodriguez-Morales et al. 2020). As of May 18, 2020, the world has recorded 53, 70,375 cases and 3, 44,454 deaths with the highest mortality in the USA; India has witnessed a total of 96,192 cases and 3039 fatalities (WHO 2020). Preliminary analysis reveals that the transmission rate for India is 1.7
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