AHMEDABAD: Despite a police notification specifying that bursting only green crackers would be allowed and that too between 8pm and 10pm on Diwali night, Amdavadis went overboard in their festivities bursting crackers with a vengeance, well past the deadline.
In many areas, smoke from burst crackers entered homes through open windows and doors resulting in people feeling as if they are inhaling the cracker fumes on even the fifth floor.
If the past research is any indication, citizens should brace up for braving air pollution for the coming days. A multi-institute study has revealed that firecrackers’ smoke not only pollutes our breathable air, but aerosols formed as a result of firecrackers’ smoke also hang thick over Ahmedabad up to 5km from the surface.
These aerosols also have the potential to warm, to a small extent, the local atmosphere over the city owing to their radiative effects which are suspension of liquid or solid particles in gas. This can also affect the cloud formation activity.
A team of scientists and researchers from Space Applications Centre (SAC), Indian Space Research Organization (Isro); Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, (IIRS) Dehradun, and St Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad studied for six days the black carbon (BC), particulate matter (PM) and aerosol optical depth (AOD) in the air column prior to and after Diwali using specialised instruments as well as satellite data.
“We observed an increase of 286%, 89.5%, and 60.5%, in BC, PM10, and PM2.5 concentrations, respectively on festival (Diwali) night as compared to pre-event days,” claims the research paper authored by Abha Chhabra of SAC, Isro, Som Sharma and Sourita Saha of PRL, Rajesh Iyer and Tejas Turakhia of St Xavier’s College, and Prakash Chauhan of IIRS, Dehradun.
Using a specialised instruments like the ground-based Raman-Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) researchers found an increased concentration of ‘anthropogenic aerosols’, precipitated by the increased use of firecrackers during Diwali.
Researchers also relied on space based CALIPSO LiDAR observations to validate the presence of ‘polluted dust’ and ‘smoke’ types aerosols at the near surface to 5 km altitude over the city.