Comparison of predicted vehicular pollution concentration with air quality standards for different time periods

• Published in: Clean technologies and environmental policy 2016-10, Vol.18 (7), p.2293-2303
• Main Authors: Kumar, Awkash, Patil, Rashmi S., Dikshit, Anil Kumar, Kumar, Rakesh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Air pollution; Air quality; Air quality standards; Bakeries; Bakery products; Climate models; Earth and Environmental Science; Emission; Emission standards; Emissions control; Environment; Environmental Economics; Environmental Engineering/Biotechnology; Environmental policy; Industrial and Production Engineering; Industrial Chemistry/Chemical Engineering; Industrial research; Load; Mathematical models; Open burning; Outdoor air quality; Pollutants; Pollution sources; Population; Quality standards; R&D; Research & development; Research Article; Sustainable Development; Vehicle emissions; Vehicles; Weather forecasting
• ISSN: 1618-954X; 1618-9558
• DOI: 10.1007/s10098-016-1147-6

Air pollution is caused by variety of sources such as industries, vehicles, cremation, bakeries, and open burning. These sources have variation in emission with different time scales. Industry and bakeries have variation in emission with day or week, rest of the sources like vehicles and domestic sector have variation with time in a day. In fact, vehicles have a large variation in emission with time period of the day. The average concentration of 24 h is much less than hourly concentration of peak time when there is heavy vehicular emissions. The hourly concentration of off-peak time or lean time is very low due to low emission for that period. The air quality standards of India are prescribed for 24-h average concentration with which the predicted average concentration from models is compared. However, the peak time concentration may be much higher than the standard. In the peak time, outdoor concentration is more and since a large proportion of the population is out the exposure is also very high and can cause severe health effect. In this paper, vehicular pollution modeling has been carried out using AERMOD with simulated meteorology by Weather Research and Forecasting model. NO x and PM concentrations were 3.6 and 1.45 times higher in peak time than off-peak and evening peak, respectively. Lean time has higher concentration for both NO x and PM than off-peak and evening peak. It shows the misleading concept of comparing average predicted concentration of 24 h with standards for vehicles.