Nitrogen dioxide decline and rebound observed by GOME-2 and TROPOMI during COVID-19 pandemic

• Published in: Air quality, atmosphere and health Vol. 14; no. 11; pp. 1737 - 1755
• Main Authors: Liu, Song, Valks, Pieter, Beirle, Steffen, Loyola, Diego G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.11.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Air pollution; Algorithms; Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Datasets; Disease control; Earth and Environmental Science; Environment; Environmental Health; Global ozone; Global ozone monitoring experiment; GOME-2; Health Promotion and Disease Prevention; Monitoring instruments; Nitrogen; Nitrogen dioxide; Ozone; Ozone monitoring; Pandemics; Pollutants; Satellites; Transportation industry; Variation; Viral diseases; COVID-19; Tropospheric NO; GOME-2; TROPOMI; Harmonized retrieval; Tropospheric NO2
• ISSN: 1873-9318; 1873-9326
• DOI: 10.1007/s11869-021-01046-2

Since its first confirmed case in December 2019, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a worldwide pandemic with more than 90 million confirmed cases by January 2021. Countries around the world have enforced lockdown measures to prevent the spread of the virus, introducing a temporal change of air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) that are strongly related to transportation, industry, and energy. In this study, NO 2 variations over regions with strong responses to COVID-19 are analysed using datasets from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) sensor aboard the EUMETSAT Metop satellites and TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) aboard the EU/ESA Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite. The global GOME-2 and TROPOMI NO 2 datasets are generated at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) using harmonized retrieval algorithms; potential influences of the long-term trend and seasonal cycle, as well as the short-term meteorological variation, are taken into account statistically. We present the application of the GOME-2 data to analyze the lockdown-related NO 2 variations for morning conditions. Consistent NO 2 variations are observed for the GOME-2 measurements and the early afternoon TROPOMI data: regions with strong social responses to COVID-19 in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America show strong NO 2 reductions of ∼ 30–50% on average due to restriction of social and economic activities, followed by a gradual rebound with lifted restriction measures.