City’s air quality has improved considerably as compared to post-Diwali days when level of pollutants had crossed 1,000 mark. National Air Quality Index (NAQI) on Sunday said the air quality values will be under ‘moderate’ for the first three days of the week that implies — values of primary pollutants will remain relatively low.
City’s air quality was marked dangerous after the bursting of crackers and biomass burning by the farmers of Punjab and Haryana. Sunday was the first time when city people woke up to a cleaner air quality as average mass concentration of both the Particulate Matter (PM) 10 and PM 2.5 was recorded at 210 µgm3 and 97 µgm3 on the ambient air quality metres of SAFAR, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) and US Embassy. Moreover, values of other harmful pollutants instance -- Ozone, Benzene and Oxides of Nitrate were also recorded under their safer limits on the meters.
Notably, from October 30 to November 7, National Capital Region (NCR) witnessed pollutant values at toxic levels, with one of the worst smog episode recorded in the first week of November according to the Centre for Environment Science (CSE) report, the levels has reached 15 times higher than safer limits , prescribed by Indian meteorological Standards (IMD) and WHO.
City’s most polluted area in context of air quality Anand Vihar has recorded 256 µgm3 concentration of PM 10 whereas it had recorded at 1,750 µgm3 during the first week of November. At IGI Airport, the pollutant values were measured at very low which was good sign for the flight operations.
Remarkably, as per the flight tracking website, pollution statistics of IGI Airport was low as compare to other Asian airports. More on this, flight operation status due to smog is low in Bejing while for Delhi airports, it was observed moderate.
According to environment scientists, warm weather and wind speed are playing pivotal role to bring down the values of Suspended Particulate Matters (SPM). As per the IMD meteorological sensors, wind speed with 11 KM/hour has been recorded while humidity level was recorded at 39 percent.
As per US Embassy real time air data, values of PM 10 and 2.5 in per cubic micro gram were recorded at 117 and 142 while other pollutants (Ozone, Nitrate of Oxides) values were recorded at 3 and 11.
Importantly, value of carbon monoxide was recorded at Zero at all monitoring stations of Delhi-NCR region.