Adverse impacts of fog events during winter on fine particulate matter, CO and VOCs: a case study of a highway near Dhanbad, India

Abstract

Adverse meteorological conditions due to frequent fog events during the winter period are a primary cause of the sharp increase in the number of cities with high levels of air pollution, especially in terms of fine particulate matter. Dense fog events were recorded over Dhanbad, in the eastern part of India, during January 2015. Variations in particulate matter (mass/number) concentrations and gaseous pollutant concentrations (carbon monoxide (CO), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)) during foggy days were studied. Elevated ambient concentrations of air pollutants during foggy days were observed, due to high relative humidity (RH), low temperature (T) and stagnant wind conditions. During fog events, the average mass concentrations of particulate matter smaller than 1μm (PM1), 2.5μm (PM2.5), and 10μm (PM10) were observed to be 352, 394 and 497μgm−3, respectively. During fog events, high mass fractions of PM1 (72%) and PM2.5 (82%) in PM10 were observed. However, during normal winter days in January 2015 smaller fractions of PM1 (43%) and PM2.5 (57%) in PM10 were observed. This clearly indicates that fog events were responsible for the creation of additional fine particles (PM1–2.5) in the atmosphere due to adverse meteorological conditions. During fog events the levels of CO and VOCs were found to rise by 88 and 81%, respectively, relative to a normal winter day in January 2015. Similarly, particle number concentrations in the accumulation mode (265–900nm) were observed to be higher on foggy days compared to normal winter days in January 2015. Overall, this study finds that foggy conditions affected PM1–2.5 fractions considerably, and moderately affected levels of CO and VOCs.

Letter

“…I am troubled by S. K. Gupta and S. P. Elumalai's paper, Adverse impacts of fog events during winter on fine particulate matter, CO and VOC's: a case study of a highway near Dhanbad, India (Gupta and Elumalai, ), which was published in the December 2018 issue of Weather .…”

Developing a long-term high-resolution winter fog climatology over south Asia using satellite observations from 2002 to 2020

“…Severe spells of fog often reduce the near-surface visibility to less than 50-100 meters causing prolonged delays and cancellations in air and rail transportation, resulting in large socio-economic losses, and are even known to episodically trigger vehicular accidents (Hameed et al, 2000;Gautam et al, 2007;Jenamani, 2007;Ghude et al, 2017). In polluted environments, dense fog is also associated with significant air quality degradation making it a serious public health issue (Decesari et al, 2017;Li et al, 2016;Agarwal et al, 2017;Gupta and Elumalai, 2018), as well as impacts to agriculture (Zhang et al, 2014;Bhatta et al, 2016).…”

Corrigendum to ‘Adverse impacts of fog events during winter on fine particulate matter, CO and VOCs: a case study of a highway near Dhanbad, India’ (Gupta and Elumalai, 2018)

“…We would like to comment on the original research article ‘Adverse impacts of fog events during winter on fine particulate matter, CO and VOCs: a case study of a highway near Dhanbad, India’ (Gupta and Elumalai, 2018). We would like to specifically comment on the Table 1 discussion in the study.…”