Air Quality, Atmosphere, & Health

This study was commenced to evaluate the indoor and outdoor air quality concentrations of PM2.5 , sub-micron particles (PM>2.5 , PM1.0-2.5 , PM0.50 -1.0 , PM0.25-0.50 , and PM<0.25 ), heavy metals, and microbial contaminants along with their identification in three different hospitals of Lucknow City. The study was conducted from February 2022 to April 2022 in hospitals situated in the commercial, residential, and industrial belts of the city. The indoor concentration trend of particulate matter as observed during the study suggested that most of the highest concentrations belonged to the hospital situated in an industrial area...

UNLABELLED: The health impacts associated with exposure to elevated concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5 ) are well recognised. There is a substantial number of studies characterising PM2.5 concentrations outdoors, as well as in homes within low- and middle-income countries. In high-income countries (HICs), there is a sizeable literature on indoor PM2.5 relating to smoking, but the evidence on exposure to PM2.5 generated from non-tobacco sources in homes is sparse. This is especially relevant as people living in HICs spend the majority of their time at home, and in the northern hemisphere households often have low air exchange rates for energy efficiency...

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, severely impacting the island. In order to quantify the impact of the hurricane on the indoor air quality, we evaluated the fungal levels in households ( n = 20) of the Piñones community for the period of 2018 and 2019. For each dust sample collected, the 36 Environmental Relative Moldiness Index (ERMI) molds were quantified using qPCR assays, and then Shannon Diversity Index (SDI) values for the fungal populations were calculated. Homes were in five separate regions, regarding their proximity in the studied area...

Historical biomass burning in summer season (April‒June, during 2015‒2021) was assessed by studying active fire spot data recorded by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite and mapping the same over Indian landmass. The fire spots often formed regional clusters and most profusely covered the states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Manipur, Nagaland, and Mizoram during April but their number decreased conspicuously in May and further in June...

Aircraft engine emissions (AEEs) generated during landing and takeoff (LTO) cycles are important air pollutant sources that directly impact the air quality at airports. Although the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented collapse in the civil aviation industry, it also relieved some environmental pressure on airports. To quantify the impact of COVID-19 on AEEs, the amounts of three typical air pollutants (i.e., HC, CO, and NOx ) from LTO cycles at airports in central eastern China were estimated before and after the pandemic...

The nature and airborne dispersion of the underestimated biological agents, monitoring, analysis and transmission among the human occupants into building environment is a major challenge of today. Those agents play a crucial role in ensuring comfortable, healthy and risk-free conditions into indoor working and leaving spaces. It is known that ventilation systems influence strongly the transmission of indoor air pollutants, with scarce information although to have been reported for biological agents until 2019...

This study was conducted to evaluate the influence of thermal retrofit on radon levels in workrooms, and to determine whether the radon concentration in the building changes after the application of retrofit measures. In the first survey, digital Airthings Corentium Home radon detector was used for 1-month radon measurements during the heating season 2018/19. The daily averaged radon concentrations varied from 37 to 573 Bq/m3 for 10 selected workrooms, while hourly averaged radon measurements showed extreme variations from 6 to 1603 Bq/m3 due to radon fluctuations...

To contain the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, several governments around the world imposed national lockdowns including that of South Africa. The purpose of this study was to investigate and give an overview of nitrogen dioxide column levels during the year 2020 over three South African cities (Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town) using AURA OMI derived measurements, the HYSPLIT model, complemented with NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data. Our findings were that in 2020, all the cities recorded their daily maximum mean NO2 column levels during the winter season at 14...

ABSTRACT: Plastics are an integral but largely inconspicuous part of daily human routines. The present review paper uses cross-disciplinary scientific literature to examine and assess the possible effects of nanoplastics (NPs) concerning microplastics (MPs) on human health and summarizes crucial areas for future research. Although research on the nature and consequences of MPs has seen a substantial rise, only limited studies have concentrated on the atmospheric nanosized polymeric particles...

The factors that determine the concentrations of air pollutants (NO, NO2 , SO2 , O3 ), measured in 8 monitoring stations (4 rural background, 3 urban, and 1 industrial) in Estonia, are studied applying the factor analysis. The factor analysis reveals remarkable impact of COVID-19 lockdown, effects caused by dramatic decrease in oil-shale based energy production in Estonia provoked by new socio-economic conditions such as elevated price for CO2 emission quota, differences between rural and urban stations, maritime-continental difference for NO2 and ozone, and specific industrial impact in case of SO2 ...

This paper illustrates the study carried out by ARPA Lombardia to quantify the variation in daily emissions of the main pollutants and their impacts on air quality in Lombardy during the anti-COVID-19 lockdown between the end of February and the end of May 2020. A methodology for emission estimates was developed over Lombardy for this purpose and later was extended to larger areas: the Po-basin, (LIFE PREPAIR 2020) and the entire Italy (PULVIRUS 2021). In this study, the daily emissions estimates were derived by combining data from air emission inventory of Lombardy and a set of indicators that allowed to update the estimates and describe the temporal and spatial variations of the emission sources...

The intensified indoor living during the spring 2020 lockdown, with enhanced user awareness of the prevailing conditions in their homes, constituted a natural stress test for the housing design in place today. Surveys conducted during this period have yielded lessons for designing better intervention strategies for the residential sector, taking into account the systematic morphological and economic limitations of the buildings concerned. These considerations should inform the development of policies and strategies for improving environmental quality compatible with lower residential energy consumption and higher quality of life...

Air quality affects people's daily life. Air quality index (AQI) is an essential indicator for controlling air pollution and ensuring public health, whose accurate forecasting can provide timely air pollution warnings and remind people to take protective measures against air pollution in advance. To address this issue, this paper developed a new ensemble learning model for AQI forecasting. In this study, (1) the signal decomposition technique complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) is introduced to decompose the nonlinear and nonstationary AQI history data series into several more regular and more stable subseries firstly...

Wildfires have increased in the last years and, when caused by intentional illegal burnings, are frequently run out of control. Wildfire has been pointed out as an important source of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and trace elements (TEs) - such as, As, Ni, and Pb - to environmental compartments, and thus may pose a risk to human health and to the ecosystem. In 2020, the Brazilian biome, Pantanal, faced the largest losses by wildfires in the last 22 years. Ashes from the topsoil layer in Pantanal were collected after these wildfires at 20 sites divided into the sediment, forest, PF, PS, and degraded sites...

The COVID-19 outbreak has elicited forced lockdown conditions for all anthropogenic emissions across the globe. It has brought an opportunity for the researchers to sort out the relative contribution of the environmental pollutants which are emerged from the coal-based thermal power plants and other industrial sectors. In countries like India, some industrial sectors and thermal power plants coexist; henceforth, they mutually produce NO2 concentration canopy in the upper atmosphere in raised form. Focusing on this issue, the present work intends to explore the NO2 emission hot-spots' foci using switch-off conditions in consequence of emergency lockdown...

A number of previous studies have shown that statistical model with a combination of satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD) and PM2.5 measured by the monitoring stations could be applied to predict spatial ground-level PM2.5 concentration, but few studies have been conducted in Thailand. This study aimed to estimate ground-level PM2.5 over the Bangkok Metropolitan Region in 2020 using linear regression model that incorporates the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) AOD measurements and other air pollutants, as well as various meteorological factors and greenness indicators into the model...

In the year 2020, Italy faced a pandemic due to the virus SARS-CoV-2 for short COVID-19. Following this pandemic, a national lockdown period was imposed and throughout the year 2020 various measures were taken by the government to limit the mobility of people and contain the mortality associated with COVID-19. In Italy, pandemic measures led to a reduction in anthropogenic activities and provided an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate the possible effects that restrictions on anthropogenic activities may have on the air quality...

During spring 2020, unprecedented changes in local and regional emissions have occurred around the globe due to governmental restrictions associated with COVID-19. Many European countries including Austria issued partial curfews or stay-at-home order policies, which have impacted ambient air quality through reductions in non-essential transportation and energy consumption of industrial sites and work places. Here, we analyse the effect of these measures on ambient concentrations of nitrogen oxides (NOx ), ozone (O3 ) and particulate matter (PM10 ) during the first nationwide lockdown in Austria (16...

The Central Plains Urban Agglomeration (CPUA) is the largest region in central China and suffers from serious air pollution. To reveal the spatiotemporal variations and the sources of fine particulate matter (PM2.5 , with an aerodynamic diameter of smaller than 2.5 μm) concentrations of CPUA, multiple and transdisciplinary methods were used to analyse the collected millions of PM2.5 concentration data. The results showed that during 2017 ~ 2020, the yearly mean concentrations of PM2.5 for CPUA were 68...

The objective of this study is to statistically examine the variation of PM10 values measured at three stations in the center of Sivas between the years 2016 and 2020. Hourly PM10 measurement values were taken from three different stations (İstasyon Kavşağı, Meteoroloji, and Başöğretmen AQMSs) in the city center. Then the mean values of the measurements obtained between 2016 and 2020 were compared according to the years and the stations, as well as with the limit values given in the Regulation on Air Quality Assessment and Management(RAQAM)...