Delhi pollution: Air quality improves slightly, visibility poor due to shallow fog

The air quality index improved to 379 at around 8am on Tuesday morning from Mondays’ average of 390.

Delhi’s air quality improved slightly on Tuesday morning though shallow fog brought down visibility in the capital.

An official of the weather department said visibility was recorded at 700 metre at 8.30am. (Sonu Mehta/HT FILE)

The city’s minimum temperature was at 13.7 degrees Celsius, five notches above the season’s average and 5.4 notches above Monday’s 8.3 degrees Celsius.

The air quality index — a measure of pollutants in the air — had improved to 379 at around 8am on Tuesday morning from Mondays’ average of 390 on a scale of 0 - 500. Levels of particulate matter had also dropped. But the AQI was still on the higher side of “very poor” category which is between 301 to 400.

An AQI value above 400 on the scale of 500 is considered as severe pollution. Such high levels of pollution were last seen on November 14 when the city had just come out of the week-long haze. Monday’s average AQI had shot up to 390 from 351 on Sunday.

An official of the weather department said visibility was recorded at 700 metre at 8.30am.

IMD has predicted cloudy sky and shallow fog on Wednesday morning as well.

“Even though the average AQI is yet to hit severe levels, several monitoring stations in the city such as Shadipur, RK Puram, Anand Vihar, Siri Fort and CRRI had already entered the severe zone,” a senior official of the Delhi Pollution Control Committee had said.

The levels of particulate matter — the dominant and one of the most dangerous pollutants — had also shot up to alarming levels. At around 7pm on Monday, the levels of PM10 and PM2.5 had already shot up around 4.5 times the safe standards.