Impact of lockdown measures to combat Covid-19 on air quality over western Europe

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Abstract

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 NO ₂ concentrations, a lower reduction in Particulate Matter (PM) concentrations and a mitigated effect on ozone concentrations due to non-linear chemical effects.

Graphical abstract

Highlights

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Air pollution modelling
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COVID19 epidemy
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Regional modelling
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Anthropogenic emissions scenario
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Impact of emissions reduction

Related collections

Author and article information

Contributors

Laurent Menut

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Total Environ

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci. Total Environ

Title: The Science of the Total Environment

Publisher: The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

ISSN (Print): 0048-9697

ISSN (Electronic): 1879-1026

Publication date PMC-release: 23 June 2020

Publication date (Electronic): 23 June 2020

Electronic Location Identifier: 140426

Affiliations

[a ]Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD), Ecole Polytechnique, IPSL Research University, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Université Paris-Saclay, Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, CNRS, Route de Saclay, 91128 Palaiseau, France

[b ]Now at Citepa, Technical Reference Center for Air Pollution and Climate Change, 42, rue de Paradis, 75010 Paris, France

[c ]Laboratoire Interuniversitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques (LISA), UMR CNRS 7583, Université Paris Est Créteil et Université de Paris, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Créteil, France

Author notes

[* ]Corresponding author. menut@ 123456lmd.polytechnique.fr

Article

Publisher ID: S0048-9697(20)33948-6 Publisher ID: 140426

DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140426

PMC ID: 7309726

PubMed ID: 32593893

SO-VID: 3f4567fc-acb1-45e2-b289-d58b1fbf13e2

License:

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

History

Date received : 10 May 2020

Date revision received : 19 June 2020

Date accepted : 20 June 2020

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