AQI monitors on drones at junctions in Mumbai soon

The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) will begin an ambitious exercise to monitor air pollution across busy traffic junctions in the city using drones (unmanned

The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) will begin an ambitious exercise to monitor air pollution across busy traffic junctions in the city using drones (unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs) this month.

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Air quality monitors mounted on drones will provide real-time data on ground level tailpipe emission from vehicles. The exercise is being carried out on an experimental basis to determine the concentration of different pollutants close to the surface, and identify the altitude at which vertical dispersion takes place (natural factors such as wind scattering accumulated particles).

“For ambient air quality, we currently have little knowledge about site-specific concentration of pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides etc. and it is difficult to understand the rate of dispersion (to what altitude vertical dispersion takes place). Mumbai has been taken up as the model city, with some busy traffic stretches to understand this,” said Sudhir Srivastava, chairman, MPCB. “This is the best time to do this as the onset of winter is expected soon.”

Junctions at Andheri, Bandra, Sion, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, and Haji Ali will be continuously monitored over 15 days. “Researchers use balloons to acquire data to get measurements at a certain height from the ground. In this case, the drone will allow us to take a three-dimensional profile of a traffic junction,” said Srivastava, adding the drones will be hired and MPCB is coordinating with the Mumbai police for permissions.

After assessing the data, mitigation measures will be identified under the city’s air pollution action plan, and the exercise will be replicated for point sources such as industrial units and construction/demolition waste. “We stumbled upon this while trying to understand the feasibility of WAYU installed in Mumbai in 2017,” said Srivastava.

The concept is similar to NEERI’s drone app which was launched last month in Nagpur. “Use of drone-mounted sensors to analyse air pollution is increasing globally and it is a cost-effective technology,” said SN Tripathi, professor, Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur and member of National Clean Air Programme apex committee.

“We have to see the effectiveness of the calibrated monitors and data accuracy,” said Ronak Sutaria, founder and director, UrbanSciences, an independent air quality monitoring group.