Manju Mohan *,Shweta Bhati
Wind flow conditions play an important role in the assimilative capacities of urban airsheds. It is desired that urban planners associate due importance to wind flow conditions while designing the cities considering its likely impact on ambient air quality. Further, considering the explosive growth of megacities across the world it is required to rank these cities as per their assimilative capacities where wind flow conditions can play an important role. This study scrutinizes wind flow conditions (stagnation, ventilation and recirculation), associated air quality and emissions for two megacities namely, Delhi and Mumbai to illustrate the pivotal role, the meteorology could play in location of urban airsheds. The study shows a dominance of stagnation conditions with few cases of recirculation events over Delhi. Ambient levels of pollutants were found to correlate positively with stagnation conditions in Delhi. Mumbai was found to have higher ventilation and recirculation events and lower ambient levels of the pollutants. Further, this study for two megacities demonstrated that persistently poor air flow conditions for an urban airshed could lead to poorer air quality even with lower emissions (Delhi) in comparison to a city with lower pollution potential and higher emissions (Mumbai). Simple methodologies as adopted here could be practiced to scrutinise carrying capacities of the cities and to rank these for their pollution potential that could be helpful to regulators for emission control strategies.
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