Air quality monitoring system put in place

“This is for the first time India will be having a system for air quality forecasting,” Shailesh Nayak, secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, said after inaugurating the System of Air Quality Forecasting and Research at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium here on Wednesday.

The system will be fed pollution data primarily by a network of 11 air quality monitoring stations — six of them are in various CWG stadiums and one at the Games Village — and 35 automatic weather stations.

There will also be supplementary data from a GPS sonde and the lone Doppler radar. All would be fed into a software to generate the pollution forecast.

The forecast would be a range of pollutants such as ozone, oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, particulate matters, benzene, toluene, xylene and black carbon. “We were testing it since the last three weeks. The error margin is only about 5-10 per cent,” Gufran Beig, a senior scientist from Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology that developed the system, told Deccan Herald. To factor in the capital’s heavy traffic in pollution forecast, IITM conducted a survey between October 2009 and June 2010 to collect the baseline data on the number of vehicles passing through the signals on busy and not-so-busy roads in Delhi and its satellite towns.

This emission inventory was fed into the system. “The vehicular activity will vary day by day. But our model has taken care of that factor as well as reduction in the level of particulate matter following the heavy rain” Beig said.
The pollution level will be displayed at all stadiums, airport, Games Village and outside the offices of weather agencies and ministry.
In fact trials over the last three weeks showed that the air quality index in major CWG venues was in the range of “good to moderate” so far.
DH News Service

Police debunk Oz TV sting operation
The Delhi Police on Wednesday described as “totally bogus, motivated and deliberately planted” a sting operation carried out by an Australian television channel claiming that there was a security breach at the Jawahar Lal Nehru Stadium, the main Commonwealth Games venue, PTI reports from New Delhi.

Delhi Police spokesperson Rajan Bhagat said the sting operation was “totally bogus and incorrect” and the reporter was trying to create a false impression of security breach by walking from barricades placed on the main road near the stadium which were only meant to divert vehicles.

He said the spot was far away from the main entry gate of the Jawahar Lal Nehru Stadium from where the actual manual checking of those entering the venue is done.