Ambient monitoring in India uses a mix of manual and continuous stations, operated and maintained by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and the respective State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs), under the National Ambient Monitoring Program (NAMP). In 2016, the manual monitoring network covered ~250 cities and includes ~550 stations, measuring and reporting PM10, SO2, and NO2 concentrations, approximately once every 2-3 days. The continuous monitoring network is expanding, which as of 2016 covers only the Tier I and some Tier II cities.
In Nagpur, there is 1 continuous monitoring station and 5 manual stations. The PM2.5 timeseries plot (below) is updated every 30 minutes, presenting an average of the data (raw data, as reported by the SPCBs) from all the known real-time public monitoring stations, for the last 8 days. A summary of ambient monitoring data for other pollutants is available here as timeseries and boxplots.
A secondary source to download archived data is @ http://www.openaq.org (this is a portal with open access to monitoring data from stations across the globe; and also allows you to download data for select station or city or time period; compare data between stations, between cities, visualize the trends spatially and temporally, and much more).
A summary of available measured PM10, SO2, and NO2 concentrations from the manual NAMP stations is presented below (source: data.gov.in).
Particulate Matter (less than 10 μm) (PM10)
Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2)
Surface PM2.5 concentrations can be constructed using the satellite feeds and global chemical transport models. Though satellites are not measuring one location at all the times, a combination of satellites provide a cache of measurements, which are interpreted using the global chemical transport models to better represent the vertical mix of pollution, and finally arrive at the ground-based estimates with the help of past ground-based measurements. The global transport models rely on gridded emission estimates for multiple sectors to establish a relationship with satellite observations over multiple years. For example, these databases were used to study the global burden of disease, which estimated air pollution as the top 10 causes of premature mortality and morbidity in India. A summary of PM2.5 concentrations for Nagpur (Maharashtra) from this exercise is presented below. The global PM2.5 files are available @ Dalhousie University. At best, these global results are useful for evaluating annual trends and not suitable for studying daily or hourly trends linked to local emissions and local environments, which are best represented by the on-ground monitoring networks.
Back to the Nagpur page. Back to the APnA city program page.
A visualization of ambient monitoring data from networks across India is here.
All the analysis and results are sole responsibility of the authors @ UrbanEmissions.Info. Please send you comments and questions to simair@urbanemissions.info.