El Assessment of COVID-19 lockdown impact on PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area
Main Article Content
Abstract
PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations are regularly monitored because they cause adverse effects on human health. The concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 vary within a city due to land use, the amount of traffic, and pollution sources. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, lockdowns were enacted to stop the spread of the virus. These lockdowns meant reduced mobility and the halt of certain economic activities which had an impact on air pollution sources. In this paper, we assess the effect of the lockdown enacted in April-May 2020 in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area on PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations, using statistical analysis tools. MODIS-derived aerosol optical depth is used to assess the change of aerosols spatial distribution during the lockdown. Furthermore, a Mann-Whitney test is applied to PM10 and PM2.5 data from ground-based monitoring stations to evaluate the effects of lockdown. A general reduction of 20 % of PM10 and 10 % in PM2.5 was found. Overall, a 15 % reduction in particulate matter was found in Mexico City due to lockdown.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Once an article is accepted for publication, the author(s) agree that, from that date on, the owner of the copyright of their work(s) is Revista Internacional de Contaminación Ambiental. Reproduction of the published articles (or sections thereof) for non-commercial purposes is permitted, as long as the source is provided and acknowledged. Authors are free to upload their published manuscripts at any non-commercial open access repository. Accepted, but not published articles (preprints), are not allowed to be distributed by any means. The violation of this rule may end in the withdrawal of the accepted article.
PLUMX metrics