India Lockdown Has Led To A 40-50% Decrease In The Air Pollution Levels

The COVID-19 outbreak and the nationwide lockdown has added changes to people’s lifestyle. People need to work from home, kids can’t go outside to play and everything has gotten out of hand.

However, amid this chaotic, there is still something that is positive. As the pandemic hits pause on all activities globally, Mother Earth is healing. The Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite recently captured images showing a significant drop in pollution in various Indian cities.

From March 24th to April 20th, India saw a considerable drop in terms of average nitrogen dioxide concentrations.

Compared to the same time last year, the India lockdown has led to a 40 to 50% decline in pollution levels.

Claus Zehner, mission manager at ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P, said that the interesting thing about these new maps were the high nitrogen dioxide concentrations in northeast India, which was directly linked with the ongoing coal-fired power plants. The Vindhyachal Super Thermal Power Station, India’s largest power station, sees a 15% reduction in nitrogen dioxide concentrations compared to the same time the previous year.

Vehicles, industries, and power plants release nitrogen dioxide into the atmosphere, resulting in several respiratory issues. Ever since the lockdown was implemented, the levels of nitrogen dioxide have dropped significantly.

A Reuters report also revealed that March 2020 also experienced a 9.2% decrease in power consumption. Data from the Power System Operation Corporation Ltd. revealed that 100.2 billion kilowatt-hours were consumed in March 2020 compared to 110.33 billion kilowatt-hours of March 2019.

When making these assessments, weather variability was also an important factor that needed to be taken into account, Claus added. That was why the team had collected the data for a longer period of time. For this particular case, it was the decreased human activity that led to the drop in air pollution.

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