COVID-19 lockdowns reduce the Black carbon and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons of the Asian atmosphere: source apportionment and health hazard evaluation

Abstract

The entire world is affected by Coronavirus disease , which is spreading worldwide in a short time. India is one of the countries which is affected most, therefore, the Government of India has implemented several lockdowns in the entire country from April 25, 2020. We studied air pollutants (i.e., PM 2.5 , Black Carbon (BC), and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) level, and observed significantly sudden reduced. In India, most of the anthropogenic activities completely stopped. Therefore, we studied the levels of BC, PAHs and PM 2.5 concentrations, their sources apportion, and health risk assessment during normal days, lockdown (from lockdown 1.0 to lockdown 4.0) and unlock down 1.0 situation at Sakchi, Jamshedpur city. It was observed that lockdowns and unlock down situations BC, PAHs and PM 2.5 concentrations were significantly lower than regular days. We applied the advanced air mass back trajectory (AMBT) model to locate airborne particulate matter dispersal from different directions to strengthen the new result. The diagnostic ratio analyses of BC shows that wood burning contribution was too high during the lockdown situations. However, during normal days, the PAHs source profile was dedicated toward biomass, coal burning, and vehicle emission as primary sources of PAHs. During the lockdown period, emission from biomass and coal burning was a significant contributor to PAHs. The summaries of health risk assessment of BC quantified an equal number of passively smoked cigarettes (PSC) for an individual situation was studied. This study focuses on the overall climate impact of pandemic situations.

Long-Term Exposure to PM2.5, Facemask Mandates, Stay Home Orders and COVID-19 Incidence in the United States

“…This diluted the associations we observed for the later stage of the pandemic. Stay home orders, also known as lockdown, was associated with reduced air pollution in many countries [ 18 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ], including the U.S. [ 38 ]. During lockdown, reduced overall mortality was observed in China [ 39 ]; less excess life cancer risk was estimated in India [ 40 ]; and saving due to reduced morbidity might meanwhile relieve economic loss [ 42 ].…”

Variation and dispersal of PM10 and PM2.5 during COVID-19 lockdown over Kolkata metropolitan city, India investigated through HYSPLIT model

“…The short-term improvement of quality of the total environment is due to the result of lockdown system (S. Gautam, 2020a , Gautam, 2020b , Ambade et al, 2021 ). The magnitude of air pollution of different metropolitan cities of India (Cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai) has been declined during lockdown period ( CPCB, 2020 ; A.S. Gautam et al, 2020; Sharma et al, 2020 ).…”

Functional ANOVA approaches for detecting changes in air pollution during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Different studies have already documented the effects of COVID-19 lockdown measures on many aspects of human activities, such as transportation (Mogaji 2020 ), renewable and sustainable energy (Hosseini 2020 ), health risk assessment (Gautam and Trivedi 2020 ; Ambade et al. 2021 ; Zoran et al. 2020 ; Gupta et al.…”