14 October 2020.
Introduction:
According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences,The India Meteorological Department has operationalised an advanced high-resolution air quality early warning system for the national capital as well as a separate one for the country.
Highlights:
- A very high-resolution city scale modelENFUSER (ENvironmental information FUsion SERvice) for Delhi has been operationalised to identify the air pollution hotspots and pollution up to the street level,
- According to V K Soni, head of the Environment Monitoring Research Centre of the IMD,the Pollution can be captured better with this model
- . Delhi has about 40 air quality monitoring systems.
- As of now the monitoring of traffic congestion is done at a 5-metre resolution, and land use and land cover at 30-metre resolution.
- ENFUSER will improve the forecasting.
- The air quality forecast modelSystem for Integrated Modelling of Atmospheric Composition (SILAM)for the country has been further improved by implementing global emission inventories CAMS-GLOB v2.1 supplemented with EDGAR v4.3.2 for coarse and mineral-fine anthropogenic particulate matter at 10 kilometres resolution.
- This will reduce the uncertainty in the forecast.
- Major uncertainty comes from sources of emission and another uncertainty comes from meteorology.
- Earlier, the chemistry transport model coupled with the meteorological forecast model was being used.
About SILAM and ENFUSER:
- SILAM and ENFUSER have been developed in technical collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI).
- The speciality of the ENFUSER is the high utilisation of measurement data such as air quality observations, a detailed description of the road network, buildings, land-use information, high resolution satellite images, ground elevation and population data.
- The ENFUSER natively taps into the operative IMD’s regional SILAM access point.
- The ENFUSER results are being evaluated with the satellite measurements and observations, and a model is found to capture the hotspots over Delhi very well.
- The SILAM models have been extensively validated against observations over Indian region.
WRF-Chem
It is another air quality model that has been updated by the Indian Meteorological Department.
What is Air Quality Monitoring?
Air quality monitoring regulates 12 pollutants namely Sulphur dioxide Nitrogen dioxide nikal arsenic LED pen been Ammonia carbon monoxide ozone PM 10, PM 2.5 and BaP. However, across the cities only PM 10, Sulphur dioxide and Nitrogen dioxide or monitored regularly. Other pollutants are monitored only in selected City. India has National ambient air quality standards to be followed in urban areas.
Air Quality Monitoring in India
In India the air quality monitoring is conducted by central pollution control board and the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in cities.
According to the central pollution control board more than 131 cities are exceeding the permissible limit of PM 10 and 18 cities are exceeding the permissible limit of Nitrogen dioxide.
.