In this work, the air quality indexes (AQIs) determined in Rio de Janeiro from July to September 2016, before and during the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, in the monitoring stations operated by the Municipal Secretariat of the Environment, were compiled and analyzed. Only four automatic monitoring stations determined all the Brazilian criteria pollutants (smog, total particulate matter, PM 10 (particulate matter < 10 mm), NO 2 , ozone and SO 2). NO 2 and PM 10 levels were generally lower during the Olympic period because of restrictions on vehicular flux. However, ozone concentrations remained high, due to unfavorable meteorological conditions. The worst conditions were observed in Bangu and Irajá Districts, where ozone concentrations frequently exceeded 160 mg m-3. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as ozone concentrations increase above this value, health effects became increasingly numerous and more severe. Brazilian air quality allowable standards are clearly higher than WHO guidelines, which, in addition to the combined results of the adopted air quality indexes and the use of a restricted number of criteria pollutants to report the air quality, led to AQIs in the intervals good and moderate, despite concentrations frequently being high in terms of WHO guidelines.
Several evidences support the idea that the Homo sapiens has become a geological force, which may introduce changes not only in human life but also in the life of all living species in the Earth and on the equilibrium of chemical and biochemical process. Nowadays, some anthropogenic events, such as accidents in industrial and energy supplies, mainly nuclear plants, may release huge quantities of pollutants which may affect Earths's life in a similar way than natural events, such as volcanic eruptions. In this work, the trajectory model HYSPLIT (Hybrid Singled-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory), which has an easy implementation, is presented to simulate the air trajectories. As case studies, a natural event, the Puyehue volcano (Chile) eruption, and a fire episode in the port area of Guarujá (SP, Brasil) were selected. The volcano eruption began on June 04, 2011 and the ashes first reached the region of Bariloche and Villa La Angostura (Argentina). Lately the ashes reached the North of Patagonia and Buenos Aires (Argentina) and finally Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and the South of Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina). The fire in Guarujá lasted 37 hours and began in a freight terminal on January 14, 2016. Toxic gases affected the accident area (Vicente de Carvalho District in the city of Guarujá, SP), and diffused in Guarujá, reaching Santos and Cubatão. Using HYSPLIT model, it was possible to reproduce the air masses trajectories in a good agreement with available data for both events. This study shows that the program, which can be used online, provides satisfactory results, consistent with satellite data and information from meteorological and air quality stations, both for natural events, such as volcanic eruptions and natural fires, and, also for accidents in industries, nuclear plants and fires.
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