Atmospheric Chemistry Brown Bag Talk 11/20/2020

Friday November 20 12 PM 

Dr. Debora Griffin

Environment Canada

Title: Recent changes in urban nitrogen dioxide: isolating COVID-19 lockdown from natural variability

Abstract:

States of emergency were declared throughout much of the world in the wake of the outbreak of Coronavirus disease in 2019 (COVID-19), with many countries imposing stay-at-home orders and travel restrictions. Consequently, vehicle and aircraft traffic reduced drastically in cities. This led to a sharp decline in emissions of associated pollutants to air quality. One such pollutant is nitrogen oxide (NOx), an air quality pollutant that affects respiratory health. With the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) changes in NOx can be observed globally. Using Environment and Climate Change’s air quality forecast model (GEM-MACH) together with the TROPOMI observations, we can entangle the impact of meteorology, natural variability and satellite sampling patterns from the lock-down associated decline of emissions. We found emission declines ranging from over 40% to less than 10% for cities in the US and Canada for the spring of 2020.

Please contact Dale Allen (djallen@umd.edu) if you would like the zoom link to the talk