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Air Quality Change in Association with COVID-19 Pandemic

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Air, Climate Change and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2023) | Viewed by 5839

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Yichen Wang

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Guest Editor

School of Public Policy and Administration, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710129, China
Interests: physical and chemical characteristics and source analysis of air pollutants; the health effects of air pollutants

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus, Sars-Cov-2) pandemic offers an opportunity to obtain fundamental answers concerning how air quality would be altered if human and economic activities were largely reduced. Such a question is definitely difficult to be resolved via calculations and simulation models. Sustainability is an international, cross-disciplinary, scholarly, peer-reviewed, and open access journal of the environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. Novel and scientifically sound contributions will be processed expeditiously so the information can be timely disseminated to the scientific community and the public. We are calling for contributions on papers addressing air quality change in association with the COVID-19 pandemic. We seek papers on the following topics:

Changes in air quality related to the control of COVID-19;
The health and economic effects of the changes in air quality during the COVID-19 control period;
Physicochemical characteristics of particulate matter during the COVID-19 control period;
Source apportionment of particulate matter during the COVID-19 control period；
The policy implications for air quality changes during the COVID-19 control period.

Dr. Yichen Wang
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

COVID-19
air quality, health, and economic effects
physicochemical characteristics
source apportionment

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

23 pages, 2483 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Effects of Mobility Restrictions on Air Pollution in the Madrid Region during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Periods

by Jorge Bañuelos-Gimeno, Natalia Sobrino and Rosa María Arce-Ruiz

Sustainability 2023, 15(17), 12702; https://doi.org/10.3390/su151712702 - 22 Aug 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1307

Abstract

Air quality is one of the problems cities face today. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to study the influence of traffic reduction on air quality during 2020, 2021, and 2022. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impacts and relationship between mobility restrictions in six COVID-19 wave periods and air pollution and evolution in the post-pandemic period differentiating Madrid city from its metropolitan area. We tested whether the changes produced for NO₂, NO_x, PM_2.5, PM₁₀, and O₃ in the urban traffic and suburban traffic air quality stations data in comparison to the 2019 reference period were significant. The findings of this study show that the periods with the greatest reduction in pollutant concentrations were the first and third COVID-19 waves, when mobility restrictions were most stringent: there was strict confinement for the first wave (i.e., 47% reduction in daily average NO₂ concentration), while severe weather forced a reduction in traffic in the region in the third wave period (i.e., 41% reduction in daily average NO_x concentration). With the return to normal activity in the last period, pollutant concentrations began to exceed pre-pandemic levels. At the urban level, the reductions were more noticeable in relation to NO₂ and NO_x, while at the suburban level, changes were less prominent, except for the O₃. The results are particularly inspiring for designing future mobility strategies for improving air quality in urban and metropolitan areas. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Air Quality Change in Association with COVID-19 Pandemic)

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14 pages, 3086 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Impacts of Certain Meteorological Factors on Atmospheric NO₂ Concentrations during COVID-19 Lockdown in 2020 in Wuhan, China

by Tianzhen Ju, Tunyang Geng, Bingnan Li, Bin An, Ruirui Huang, Jiachen Fan, Zhuohong Liang and Jiale Duan

Sustainability 2022, 14(24), 16720; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416720 - 13 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 936

Abstract

The concentration of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) in the air is one of the important indexes for evaluating air quality. At the beginning of 2020, a COVID-19 outbreak suddenly hit Wuhan, China. To effectively control the epidemic, Wuhan was put under a 76-day lockdown, during which we collected tropospheric column amounts in the atmosphere and NO₂ concentrations measured at ground monitoring stations, and we reviewed the ground NO₂ concentrations in 2019 and the tropospheric NO₂ concentrations between 2012 and 2019. Using the random forest (RF) model, we predicted the impact of the tropospheric NO₂ concentration during the lockdown period without the occurrence of the COVID-19 epidemic and analyzed the impact of multiple certain meteorological factors on tropospheric and ground NO₂ concentrations. The results showed that the tropospheric and ground NO₂ concentrations were reduced by 11.04~53.36% and 21.96~65.04%, respectively. The main factors affecting the tropospheric NO₂ concentration were wind velocity, land surface temperature, surface lifted index, precipitable water volume and tropospheric relative humanity. The main factors affecting the ground NO₂ concentration were tropospheric relative humanity, surface lifted index, land surface temperature and tropospheric temperature. The development of different emission reduction and control measures under different meteorological conditions and the formulation of more refined policies will play positive roles in improving the efficiency of air pollution control. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Air Quality Change in Association with COVID-19 Pandemic)

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19 pages, 3640 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Air Quality Changes during the COVID-19 Lockdown in an Industrial City in North China: Post-Pandemic Proposals for Air Quality Improvement

by Hongya Niu, Chongchong Zhang, Wei Hu, Tafeng Hu, Chunmiao Wu, Sihao Hu, Luis F. O. Silva, Nana Gao, Xiaolei Bao and Jingsen Fan

Sustainability 2022, 14(18), 11531; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141811531 - 14 Sep 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1630

Abstract

To better understand the changes in air pollutants in an industrial city, Handan, North China, during the COVID-19 lockdown period, the air quality and meteorological conditions were recorded from 1 January to 3 March 2020 and the corresponding period in 2019. Compared to the corresponding period in 2019, the largest reduction in PM_2.5–10, PM_2.5, NO₂ and CO occurred during the COVID-19 lockdown period. PM_2.5–10 displayed the highest reduction (66.6%), followed by NO₂ (58.4%) and PM_2.5 (50.1%), while O₃ increased by 13.9%. Similarly, compared with the pre-COVID-19 period, NO₂ significantly decreased by 66.1% during the COVID-19 lockdown, followed by PM_2.5–10 (45.9%) and PM_2.5 (42.4%), while O₃ increased significantly (126%). Among the different functional areas, PM_2.5 and PM_2.5–10 dropped the most in the commercial area during the COVID-19 lockdown. NO₂ and SO₂ decreased the most in the traffic and residential areas, respectively, while NO₂ increased only in the township and SO₂ increased the most in the industrial area. O₃ increased in all functional areas to different extents. Potential source contribution function analysis indicated that not only the local air pollution lessened, but also long-distance or inter-regional transport contributed much less to heavy pollution during the lockdown period. These results indicate that the COVID-19 lockdown measures led to significantly reduced PM and NO₂ but increased O₃, highlighting the importance of the synergetic control of PM_2.5 and O₃, as well as regional joint prevention and the control of air pollution. Moreover, it is necessary to formulate air pollution control measures according to functional areas on a city scale. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Air Quality Change in Association with COVID-19 Pandemic)

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9 pages, 2655 KiB

Open AccessEditor’s ChoiceCommunication

Analysis of the COVID-19 Lockdown’s Impact on Air Quality in the Larger Cities of Spain

by Edgar Lorenzo-Sáez, Eloína Coll-Aliaga, Jose-Vicente Oliver-Villanueva, Fernando Prieto del Campo and Victoria Lerma-Arce

Sustainability 2022, 14(9), 5613; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095613 - 6 May 2022

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1397

Abstract

During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the air quality reached the best levels to be recorded in large cities in Spain. To analyze and demonstrate this improvement in air quality levels, the evolution of the average nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) levels in 78 Spanish cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants during the pre-COVID-19 years (2017–2019), the period of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the post-COVID-19 year (2021) was analyzed. The results show an improvement in the air quality in most of the cities analyzed for 2020 due to the COVID-19 restrictions. In addition, in 2021, without the COVID-19 restrictions, the air quality levels of the largest cities in Spain showed important improvements in terms of NO₂ concentration compared to the levels in the pre-COVID-19 years (2017–2019). Nevertheless, in 2021, only 11 cities were below the average annual limit of 10 µg/m³ NO₂ established by the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition, no cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants achieved NO₂ levels below the WHO limit. Finally, a detailed monthly analysis indicated that the pre-COVID-19 levels were reached again during the last months of the monitored period. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Air Quality Change in Association with COVID-19 Pandemic)

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