Page 11 - Breathing Cleaner Air - Ten Scalable Solutions for Indian Cities
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7 Clean Air Mission for India - Ten Solutions

Analysis Methodology

The analyses and solutions developed here are based mentioned below were based on targeted simulations
on a synthesis of studies and reports done over the last conducted for the purpose of this study by adopting
decade.The details are described in depth in a companion WRF-CMAQ model (Byun et al., 1999; Skamarock et al.,
report to be released in the near future (Sharma et al., 2008) at a spatial resolution of 4 km by 4 km for the
2016a). A draft copy can be obtained from the Chairs of Delhi and NCR (National Capital Region, consisting
this summary report. of 16 districts around Delhi with a scale of 240 km by
280 km), and 36 km by 36 km resolution for the region
In particular, we relied on air pollution emission outside NCR, including Uttar Pradesh and rest of India.
inventories and air quality simulations, as well as studies Rest of India is included in the assessment to estimate
of regional impacts on health, agriculture and climate, contributions of these regions to air quality in Delhi and
done with meso- and regional scale models by national Uttar Pradesh. Emissions of neighbouring countries and
and international groups including: Sri Ramachandra boundary conditions have been taken from Chatani
University; TERI; Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology; et al., 2014, to account for contributions from outside
IIT, Delhi, IIT, Kanpur; Max Planck Institute of Chemistry, India. All of the targeted simulations were done only
Mainz; University of Iowa; and University of California at for the month of December 2015. In deducing our
San Diego.We adopted only those aspects of these studies findings, we took care to adopt only those results that
where there is a general consensus among the various are generalizable. We picked December since it is one of
groups mentioned above. There are still uncertainties in the most polluted periods of the year and hence, control
emission inventories; however, it was encouraging that of pollution in this season will ensure much lower levels
studies are converging on the impacts of air pollution on in other seasons too.
health (both qualitatively and quantitatively), impacts
on crop yields (qualitative agreement in the sign of the We picked two regions for our analyses—Delhi, as an
impact), regional climate impacts such as the air pollution example of a mega city of India and the state of Uttar
impacts on the monsoon (qualitative agreement in the Pradesh, as an example of a large polluted region. It is
sign of the impact), and the large warming effects of our expectation that measures to reduce air pollution,
black carbon. effective in these regions, will also likely apply to other
regions in India.
Some of the findings and the recommendations
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