Atmospheric Aerosols: Air Quality and Climate Change Perspectives

Abstract

Recently, air quality has become a matter of concern of everyone. According to the reports, atmospheric aerosols play very crucial role in air quality. PM 10 and PM 2.5 aerosols are integral parts of total suspended particulate matter which affect our health. Often air quality has been reported very poor due to violation of National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) limits. PM 10 and PM 2.5 limits are crossed for both residential as well as sensitive sites. This is one of the major reasons of increasing cases of respiratory diseases in urban areas. However, aerosol loadings alone are not the factor for deciding or predicting toxic and harmful effects of aerosols. Chemical composition and size ranges do matter. Aerosol loadings can be due to three major source categories viz. marine, crustal and anthropogenic. Since, marine and crustal content of aerosols are generally non-toxic and hence, degree of toxicity of air needs to be decided on the basis of anthropogenic fraction having metals, PAHs and other harmful content. Apart from air quality and health, atmospheric aerosols play vital role in other atmospheric processes such as cloud formation, radiative transfer and monsoon etc. Though there are several studies reported on different aspects of atmospheric aerosols, but most of the findings are sort of data reporting based on short term observations. Hence, there is need to investigate the atmospheric aerosols in order to demonstrate local and regional phenomenon on the basis of long term datasets.

`New Normal’ of COVID-19: Need of New Environmental Standards

“…At present, due to high soil-dust influence, values of particulate matter are often noticed above prescribed NAAQS levels. 11 For example, the 24 hrs NAAQS limit for PM 10 is 100 µg/m 3 but the average is reported as 251 µg/m 3 while that of NAAQS limit is 60 µg/m 3 but the recorded average is 129 µg/m 3 in the NCR 12 . The recorded values are most of the time crossing the prescribed levels because of dusty ambient conditions of the region 13 ..…”

A Quantum Chemical Investigation into the Molecular Mechanism of the Atmospheric Reactions of Chemi-Ions with Nitrogen and Nitrogen Oxides

“…The formation and evolution of chemi-ions in aircraft engines and the atmosphere are well studied [ 26 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. It is well known that chemi-ions, particularly negatively charged ions, play a significant role in the formation of volatile aerosol particles [ 28 , 32 , 33 ], which pose adverse effects on both human health [ 34 ] and the environment [ 35 ]. These negative ions could react with nitrogen and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere and aircraft engines to generate ions that contribute to forming aerosol clusters [ 26 , 36 ].…”

Aerosol diffusion battery: The retrieval of particle size distribution with the help of analytical formulas

“…The need to measure aerosol spectra has grown during the last few decades in various fields of science and technology. The most important areas for the application of aerosol techniques include the ambient air quality studies (Harrison 1986;Manzoor and Kulshrestha 2015;Fuzzi et al 2015;Sabbagh-Kupelwieser et al 2010), nanoaerosol medicine (Sanders 2011;Carvalho et al 2015), nanotechnology (Biskos et al 2008), occupational health (Volkwein et al 2011;Vosburgh et al 2013;Gorbunov et al 2009) and others.…”