Air quality monitoring just got a fresh lease of life

The Indian Express , Friday, March 11, 2005
Correspondent : Vinita Deshmukh
IF the Pune Municipal Corporation’s (PMC) grand plans of acting as a nodal agency to monitor the city’s air pollution have come a cropper, the advent of an expert from the United States Environmental Protection Agency is likely to resuscitate the programme. Slated to start mid-December, PMC’s Air Quality Management (AQM) cell was supposed to coordinate with the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) and the University of Pune’s Department of Environmental Sciences to collate weekly readings of ambient air quality (AAQ) to help in the study of the nature of air pollutants.

After showing initial enthusiasm, the PMC became irregular in collecting data from UoP and MPCB. This reduced the exercise to a routine affair with little or no analysis possible of the data collected by the other agencies.

Now as a part of a broader understanding with the Union Environment & Forest Ministry, a representative of USAEP, Ajay Ojha, has taken over the functioning of the AQM cell. And hopefully things will start to work.

‘‘An MoU will be signed after which the UoP and MPCB would be regularly supplying data. Besides, we will also collect meteorological data to make the study comprehensive. The AQM will start functioning as a proper nodal agency by April,’’ he said.

In fact, from March 14-17 experts from USEPA, headed by John Mooney, would be conducting a workshop to introduce the working of AERMOD - the software dispersion and dilution model which would be used to accurately predict air quality in Pune.

Once basic inputs (readings) are fed, AERMOD is able to measure — using mathematical and statistical calculations — air quality in different areas even though monitoring will be done at specific stations.

‘‘We have already collected ambient air quality readings of two years from MPCB. Now, we await readings from UoP. We are also collecting data from IMD, the Airports Authority of India and various industries,’’ said Ojha.

The entire project is a part of an exercise by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests and the USAEP.

For India, the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) is overseeing the project while the PMC’s AQM cell is the implementing agency since Pune has been chosen as the model for other cities to follow.

‘‘The final aim is to make Pune’s air clean,’’ said Ojha. For this, the project has been divided into four phases: monitoring of AAQ (already on), emission inventory (finding sources of emission — yet to start), source apportionment (zeroing in on pollutants and their quantity — yet to be done), and lastly, modelling (formulate a re-usable strategy — yet to start).

 
SOURCE : The Indian Express, Friday, March 11, 2005
 


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