Air pollutants behavior during and after lockdown in a medium-sized city

• Autor(a) principal: Tavella, Ronan Adler
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Salimene, Lucas da Silva, Ulguim , Sabrina Morales, Gabriel , Romulo Reginato, da Silva Júnior, Flavio Manoel Rodrigues
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Vittalle (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.furg.br/vittalle/article/view/13663
• topic: Poluição do ar; pandemias; SARS-Cov-2; Ozônio; Brasil

The COVID-19 Pandemic is undoubtedly the greatest public health problem of the century, to date. Among the actions sanctioned by governments to curb the spread of the virus are blocking and confinement measures, known as lockdown. Several locations around the world have shown an improvement in air quality due to reduced urban mobility during periods of lockdown. However, results in Brazil are still scarce. The aim of the study was to evaluate the behavior of air pollutants in a short-term lockdown (64 hours) in the city of Pelotas, RS. The concentrations of O3, CO, PM2.5 NO2 and SO2 were measured during and after (up to 35h) the lockdown using satellite data and the average concentrations of the previous seven days were compared. With the exception of NO2, all pollutants were reduced during the lockdown period and levels maintained even 35 hours after its end. The reduction in ozone levels during the lockdown is widely questioned worldwide, and seems to be related to less populated cities and with low concentrations of NO2. The study showed that a short period of confinement is sufficient to reduce the levels of pollutants in the air.