8/26/2023 0 Comments India climate lockdownThe improvements seen during the shutdown were also momentous because poor air quality is a prevalent cause of mortality across India, and not only just in the densely populated cities, but in rural areas too.Ī post shared by Ruptly study used images from NASA’s MODIS satellites. “Its significance was evident from the fact that our skies turned blue again and the Himalayan peaks were visible again from the lowlands during the lockdown,” he adds. “Almost 50% of anthropogenic emissions stopped, causing a 20-30% reduction in air pollution over India,” said Sarangi, who lives in India. There was a strict lockdown across India in response to coronavirus between March and May last year. During the pandemic, however, there have been widely documented improvements in air quality, for example in Delhi, notoriously known as one of the world’s most polluted cities. The north of India is a significant area for aerosol generation because of the large number of densely populated cities and its location upwind of the prevailing westerlies that carry dust during the spring and summer. “If you were to compare it with the United States it would be the equivalent of California, Oregon and Nevada.” “It’s a very vulnerable basin for climate change because of the amount of glaciers and the number of people who depend on the water from glaciers and snow melt,” lead author Ned Bair, a snow researcher from the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained in an interview. There are a lot of glacierized areas across the Indus, many found amongst its high altitude peaks. The study took place over the Indus Basin, which covers parts of China, India and Pakistan. “When deposited over snow and glaciers they can reduce the surface albedo a lot and affect the snowmelt and regional climate,” explains Sarangi.ĭarkening on the surface of Zhadang glacier. The high mountains of Asia receive a mixture of pollutants during the summer months, including light-absorbing particles like dust and black carbon. They absorb radiation from the Sun, affecting the energy and albedo (reflectiveness) of the Earth’s surface, and thus temperatures. Aerosols have also been found to significantly affect the climate over India, Chandan Sarangi, an earth systems scientist from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, told GlacierHub. This has significant implications for water resources for the more than 300 million people who rely on the glacierized areas of the Indus River Basin for water.Įmissions of aerosols, such as dust and black carbon (soot), cause snow to melt faster and earlier in the season, disrupting historical runoff patterns that local populations have long relied on to sustain livelihoods. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that during March to June last year, the concentration of polluting particles deposited on snow across a large swathe of the Himalayas was reduced by 30%. In High Mountain Asia, another remarkable effect has been documented: much cleaner winter snow. When the COVID-19 pandemic led to shutdowns around the world, many regions reported the clearest skies in decades.
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