Temporary reduction in air pollution due to anthropogenic activity switch-off during COVID-19 lockdown in northern parts
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Temporary reduction in air pollution due to anthropogenic activity switch‑off during COVID‑19 lockdown in northern parts of India Alok Sagar Gautam1 · Nikhilesh Kumar Dilwaliya2 · Ayushi Srivastava3 · Sanjeev Kumar1 · Kuldeep Bauddh4 · Devendraa Siingh5 · M. A. Shah2 · Karan Singh1 · Sneha Gautam6 Received: 1 September 2020 / Accepted: 16 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Due to fast and deadly spread of corona virus (COVID-19), the Government of India implemented lockdown in the entire country from 25 April 2020. So, we studied the differences in the air quality index (AQI) of Delhi (DTU, Okhla and Patparganj), Haryana (Jind, Palwal and Hisar) and Uttar Pradesh (Agra, Kanpur and Greater Noida) from 17 February 2020 to 4 May 2020. The AQI was calculated by combination of individual sub-indices of seven pollutants, namely PM2.5, PM10, NO2, NH3, SO2, CO and O3, collected from the Central Pollution Control Board website. The AQI has improved by up to 30–46.67% after lockdown. The AQI slope values − 1.87, − 1.70 and − 1.35 were reported for Delhi, − 1.11, − 1.31 and − 1.04 were observed for Haryana and − 1.48, − 1.79 and − 1.78 were found for Uttar Pradesh (UP), which may be attributed to limited access of transportation and industrial facilities due to lockdown. The ozone (O3) concentration was high at Delhi because of lesser greenery as compared to UP and Haryana, which provides higher atmospheric temperature favourable for O3 formation. The air mass back trajectory (AMBT) analysis reveals the contribution of air mass from Europe, Africa and Gulf countries as well as local emissions from Indo-Gangetic Plain, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra states of India. Keywords AQI · Lockdown · CPCB · Pollutants · Air mass back trajectory
* Alok Sagar Gautam [email protected] * Sanjeev Kumar [email protected] * Sneha Gautam [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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1 Introduction The influenza pandemic since the sixteenth century is known to occur twice or thrice every century (Potter 2001). In the twentieth century, the Spanish flu (1918), the Asian flu (1957) and the Hong Kong flu (1968) were reported, in which the Spanish flu originated by the H1N1 virus turned out to be the deadliest of all, killing 21–50 million people (Gottfredsson et al. 2008). The COVID-19 pandemic (Driggin et al. 2020) originated in Wuhan, China, where the patient zero was in December 2019 (Culp 2020). COVID-19 is a single-stranded RNA virus, size ranging from 26 to 32 kilobases (Shereen et al. 2020). Its genome is highly identical to the bat’s genome, suggesting them to be its natural host. The transmission of the virus is through respiratory droplets which occur upon close contact to an infected person or via droplets fallen on the surface (Güner et al. 2020). Since the disease occurred through human-to-human transmission (Huang et al. 2020), it soon spread to other parts of China. Considering this, the government impleme
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