new delhi: Delhi woke up to a grey morning as an apocalyptic smog blotted out the sun from the sky and smudged landmarks from view with air quality inching closer to emergency levels on Tuesday. The smog reduced visibility to merely 300 meters in the morning affecting traffic, an official of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
The air quality in Delhi and its adjoining areas were recorded in the high-end of the "severe" category bordering the level beyond which the air quality would be worse enough to declare an "emergency".
Air quality monitoring stations at Mandir Marg, Punjabi Bagh, Pusa, Rohini, Patparganj, Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Najafgarh, Sri Aurobindo Marg and Okhla Phase 2 maxed out as air quality indexes hit the 500-mark, Central Pollution Control Board data showed.
Delhi recorded an AQI of 487 at 9 am. The neighbouring cities of Faridabad (474), Ghaziabad (476), Noida (490), Greater Noida (467), and Gurugram (469) also recorded severe air quality. This is the sixth severe air day on the trot in Delhi.
Delhi is witnessing an "unusual" condition and no quick recovery is predicted from the "severe" air pollution, a central government forecasting agency said on Tuesday.
The Ministry of Earth Sciences' air quality monitor, SAFAR, said three major factors are responsible for this situation — secondary particle formation, extremely calm local surface winds and stubble burning-related intrusion.
"Due to a high moisture content, humidity has touched a new high and the air holding capacity has increased under such cool conditions, triggering rapid secondary fine particulate formation — a scientific process when gas-to-particle conversion happens and in-situ chemical production takes place on available surfaces and multiplies PM2.5," the SAFAR added.
The extremely calm local surface winds continued to arrest all old and new accumulated pollutants, it said.
SAFAR said Delhi's air is likely to improve to the lower end of the "severe" category to the higher end of the "very poor" category on Wednesday owing to a change in the transport-level wind direction.
It added that the farm fire count in neighbouring states stood at 2,247 on Monday. "It is still significantly high," it said, adding that the share of stubble burning in Delhi's PM2.5 pollution was 22 per cent on Tuesday.