Impact of lockdown measures to combat Covid-19 on air quality over western Europe
Autor
Menut, Laurent
Bessagnet, Bertrand
Siour, Guillaume
Mailler, Sylvain
Pennel, Romain
Cholakian, Arineh
Institución
Resumen
Recent studies based on observations have shown the impact of lockdown measures taken in various European
countries to contain the Covid-19 pandemic on air quality. However, these studies are often limited to compare
situations without and with lockdown measures, which correspond to different time periods and then under different meteorological conditions. We propose a modelling study with the WRF-CHIMERE modelling suite for
March 2020, an approach allowing to compare atmospheric composition with and without lockdown measures
without the biases of meteorological conditions. This study shows that the lockdown effect on atmospheric composition, in particular through massive traffic reductions, has been important for several short-lived atmospheric
trace species, with a large reduction in NO2 concentrations, a lower reduction in Particulate Matter (PM) concentrations and a mitigated effect on ozone concentrations due to non-linear chemical effects.
© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license