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. 2020 Aug:187:109634.
doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.109634. Epub 2020 May 5.

Decline in PM2.5 concentrations over major cities around the world associated with COVID-19

Akshansha Chauhan  1 , Ramesh P Singh  2
Affiliations

Decline in PM2.5 concentrations over major cities around the world associated with COVID-19

Akshansha Chauhan et al. Environ Res. 2020 Aug.

Abstract

The COVID-19 started from Wuhan city in China, slowly spread across the globe after December 2019. Due to movement of people from one city to other cities, one country to other countries, infection spreads and COVID-19 became a pandemic. Efforts were made at local, regional and national levels to lockdown the movement of people and to keep infected one in quarantine or isolation to stop the spread of COVID-19. The traffic, market and small industries were closed, as a result pronounced decline in the concentrations of particulate matters (PM) were observed. Normally these sources contribute to the high concentrations of particulate matters (PM2.5) which represents air quality of a location. In this short communication, we present analysis of PM2.5 of major cities (New York, Los Angeles, Zaragoza, Rome, Dubai, Delhi, Mumbai, Beijing and Shanghai) around the world suffered severely with the COVID-19. Our analysis shows decline in PM2.5 concentration due to lockdown, mainly due to less movement of people to keep "social distancing" to control the spread of CORONA-19. The low concentrations of PM2.5 reflect the efforts made in the cities to curb the spread of infection, that improve air quality.

Keywords: Air quality; COVID-19; PM(2.5); Purple air; Social distancing.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Location of various stations across world along with average PM2.5 concentrations (μg/m3) during 2017 (blue bar), 2018 (red bar), 2019 (green bar) and 2020 (yellow bar) for Dec to March for (a) New York and Los Angeles, USA; (b) Zaragoza, Spain and Rome, Italy, European cities; (c) Dubai, UAE, Delhi and Mumbai, India; and (d) Beijing and Shanghai, China. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Variations of PM2.5 and rainfall in New York, Los Angeles. A pronounced decline (linearly in the month of March) in PM2.5 is observed at both cities due to lockdown.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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