Ambient Air Quality During Covid 19 Pandemic in Chennai-An Urban Metro City of India

Abstract

COVID’19 pandemics has brought a tremendous change in the regular human life style due to the severity of the virus. In addition, a positive impact was observed in the ambient air quality due to complete absence of anthropogenic activities contributing to the air pollutants in the urban sprawl for a short duration because of the lockdown restrictions imposed by the government. In this study, we have discussed the trend of air quality with respect to pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown. It was observed that on an average 50%-70% decrease in pollutant concentration measured during lockdown compared to pre-lockdown measurements. However, post-lockdown shown an increasing trend in concentration but are within the permissible limits due to the restrictions imposed in the post-lockdown. This short analysis presented in this paper highlights the effect of lockdown over air quality improvement observed in a densely populate metro city of Tamil Nadu.