Air quality early warning for 92 more polluted cities in 2 yrs

SAFAR, developed by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorological (IITM) Pune and was operationalized by IMD in 2010 during Commonwealth Games, is India’s first metro air quality service. It currently issues 1-3 days advance forecast in 40 cities including Delhi, Pune, Mumbai and Ahmedabad of a total of 132 ‘air contaminated’ cities.

“Air quality monitoring and forecasting services by SAFAR under IMD is planning to extend its coverage to 92 more cities out of 132 air contaminated cities in the next two years,” said a government official aware of the development. “Forecast can be given to all 132 contaminated cities with the inclusion of high computational power.”

“At present, for forecast, we use the American prediction model whether it is for meteorology or pollution. The ministry of earth sciences is going to purchase some high computational servers. If we get that, it will be easy because extending forecast in new cities takes time. When we give forecast, we cannot rely on one model. We should see at least a couple of models. Otherwise, wrong signals from a model can lead to a wrong forecast,” the official said.

IMD so far has a total of 1,200 monitoring stations, including 400 real-time stations across 400-500 cities since the time the air pollution prevention Act was introduced in 1986. In Delhi alone, it has 40 real time monitoring stations and 6-7 manual stations.

Queries sent to IMD, MoEFCC, MoES and Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) remained unanswered till press time.

CPCB under the MoEFCC releases air quality index for about 226 cities by 3 pm and keeps updating it hourly each day. It also provides possible health impacts based on its six categories—good, satisfactory, moderate, poor, very poor and severe.

IMD perhaps is the first institution in the country to start systematic long term environment monitoring of atmospheric aerosol properties, ozone and precipitation chemistry.

The technical coordination and overseeing of the functions of the operational air quality forecasting services in India has been entrusted to Environment Monitoring and Research Center (EMRC), a division of IMD. EMRC conducts monitoring and research related to atmospheric constituents that can force change in the climate of the Earth, and may cause depletion of the global ozone layer, and play key roles in air quality from local to global scales.

EMRC also provides specific services to the ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MoEFCC) and other government agencies in the assessment of air pollution impacts. The weather bureau contributes to the field of atmospheric environment to the World Meteorological Organization Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) programme. The main objective of GAW is to provide data and other information on the chemical composition and related physical characteristics of the atmosphere and their trends, required to improve understanding of the behaviour of the atmosphere and its interactions with the oceans and the biosphere.

Data taken by the manual stations are filter based that follows wet waste method and does soil monitoring through remote sensing. As far as real time data collection is concerned, it uses rays like infra-red which absorbs particles for NO2, Ozone or PM2.5.

In a week, the met department takes measurements twice for the manual mode while the measurement is taken every day round the year for real-time monitoring.

Whether a city’s air is contaminated is decided by 5-6 pollutants are the major source in India as against 12 pollutants globally.

The role of air quality forecasts is growing as an Air Quality Management tool. To meet demands of operational forecasters and officials working in field of air quality management, the first edition of Standard Operational Procedure (SOP) on air quality monitoring and forecast services is being released.

The topics of this SOP are restricted to procedural aspects of air quality forecast services.

Updated: 30 Aug 2023, 11:34 PM IST