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Spatiotemporal analysis of air pollutants and river turbidity over Varanasi region, India during COVID-19 second wave

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Abstract

World Health Organization (WHO) on 30th January 2020 declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern during the spread of novel coronavirus in the early months of 2020 across 188 countries. The Indian government has imposed a 21-day lockdown during the first Coronavirus Virus Disease – 19 (COVID-19) wave starting from 25th March to 14th April initially. The state-wise lockdown was again imposed during the second wave (mid-march) to curb the spread. The present study focused on the effect of the lockdown during the COVID-19 s wave on the spatiotemporal variability of air pollutants in the Varanasi region, and on turbidity levels of the Ganga river using remote sensing. A decreasing trend for the selected air pollutants (NO2, SO2, CO, and HCHO), and turbidity levels were observed during the lockdown period which revealed improved air as well as water quality. The results of the present study provide robust insight into air and water quality measurements with methodological advancement in pollution susceptibility studies and can be used to achieve futuristic observations of patterns of turbidity levels. These results indicate that avoiding poor transportation planning and adopting sustainable plans across the urban agglomerations in India could reduce a significant amount of air pollution levels.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

Authors thanks to United States Geological Survey (USGS) for providing Landsat 8 data. The authors also thank Copernicus for providing Sentinel-5P data. Authors are also thankful to the Google Earth Engine platform for providing cloud computing facilities.

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The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geoinformatics, School of Natural Resource Management, Central University of Jharkhand, Brambe, Ranchi, 835222, Jharkhand, India

    Munizzah Salim & Shubham Bhattacharjee

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  1. Munizzah Salim
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  2. Shubham Bhattacharjee
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Correspondence to Shubham Bhattacharjee.

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Salim, M., Bhattacharjee, S. Spatiotemporal analysis of air pollutants and river turbidity over Varanasi region, India during COVID-19 second wave. Spat. Inf. Res. 32, 85–93 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41324-023-00543-z

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