Agricultural Burning and Air Quality over Northern India: A Synergistic Analysis using NASA’s A-train Satellite Data and Ground Measurements

Hiren Jethva; Duli Chand; Omar Torres; Pawan Gupta; Alexei Lyapustin; Falguni Patadia

doi:10.4209/aaqr.2017.12.0583

Agricultural Burning and Air Quality over Northern India: A Synergistic Analysis using NASA’s A-train Satellite Data and Ground Measurements

Hiren Jethva ¹^,2, Duli Chand³, Omar Torres², Pawan Gupta¹^,2, Alexei Lyapustin², Falguni Patadia²^,4

¹Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, MD 21044, USA
²NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
³Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA
⁴Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD 21251, USA

Received: December 19, 2017
Revised: March 29, 2018
Accepted: April 28, 2018
Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2017.12.0583

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Cite this article:
Jethva, H., Chand, D., Torres, O., Gupta, P., Lyapustin, A. and Patadia, F. (2018). Agricultural Burning and Air Quality over Northern India: A Synergistic Analysis using NASA’s A-train Satellite Data and Ground Measurements. Aerosol Air Qual. Res. 18: 1756-1773. https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2017.12.0583

HIGHLIGHTS

Post-monsoon crop fires in northwestern India increase PM_2.5 over New Delhi.
PM_2.5 in New Delhi correlates with NASA’s A-train satellite data of fires and aerosols.
Satellite data reveal increasing fire counts and aerosol loading during 2002–2016.

ABSTRACT

In the recent years, New Delhi, the capital city of India, has ranked among the most polluted cities in the world regarding its air quality related to the submicron Particulate Matter (PM_2.5). Using NASA’s A-train satellite data (MODIS, OMI, and CALIOP), ground-level PM_2.5 measured in New Delhi (2013–2016), and back-trajectory calculations, we show that the PM_2.5 over New Delhi is strongly affected by the agricultural fires in the northwestern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana during the post-monsoon season (October and November). The mass concentration of PM_2.5 escalates from ~50 µg m^–3 measured prior to the onset of residue burning in early October to as high as 300 µg m^–3 (24-hour averaged, 7-day running mean) during the peak burning period in early November. A linear regression analysis reveals that the variations in PM_2.5 over New Delhi can be attributed to the concurrent changes in the satellite retrievals of fire counts and aerosols over the crop burning area. The back-trajectory analysis shows that most clusters (> 80%) of the northwesterly flow near the ground intercepted the crop burning region before arriving at the receptor location in New Delhi; this further corroborates the transport patterns inferred from the satellite data. A 15-year long satellite record (2002–2016) reveals an increasing trend in agricultural fires (~617 per year) and aerosol loading (0.031 and 0.04 per year in aerosol optical depth and UV aerosol index) in November. Increasing levels of crop residue burning and resulting particulate matter pollution at an alarming rate over northern India is a pressing concern demanding corrective measures to substantially reduce or completely diminish the crop burning through an effective residue management system.

Keywords: Crop residue fires; Smoke particles; NASA’s A-train satellites; PM2.5; Northern India.