Monitoring of air pollution in Indian metropolitan cities: modelling and quality indexing

Air quality in cities is the result of a complex interaction between natural and anthropogenic environmental conditions. Delhi, as well as many other cities in India, is facing problems concerning air pollution. The increase in industrialization and the vehicle fleet, poor control on emissions and little use of catalytic converters, produce a great amount of particulate and toxic gases. Data on air pollutants and meteorological variables were collected in the metropolitan cities Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai for the period July-August, 2001. Data were treated with the bivariate regression model to explore the influence of the meteorological variables on air pollutant concentrations, and were also used to compute an Air Quality-Index, using the weighted arithmetic mean method. The proposed index seems to be applicable in the assessment of overall air quality with respect to air pollutants.