Atmospheric Aerosols: Air Quality and Climate Change Perspectives

Abstract

Recently, air quality has become a matter of concern of everyone. According to the reports, atmospheric aerosols play very crucial role in air quality. PM10 and PM2.5 aerosols are integral parts of total suspended particulate matter which affect our health. Often air quality has been reported very poor due to violation of National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) limits. PM10 and PM2.5 limits are crossed for both residential as well as sensitive sites. This is one of the major reasons of increasing cases of respiratory diseases in urban areas. However, aerosol loadings alone are not the factor for deciding or predicting toxic and harmful effects of aerosols. Chemical composition and size ranges do matter. Aerosol loadings can be due to three major source categories viz. marine, crustal and anthropogenic. Since, marine and crustal content of aerosols are generally non-toxic and hence, degree of toxicity of air needs to be decided on the basis of anthropogenic fraction having metals, PAHs and other harmful content. Apart from air quality and health, atmospheric aerosols play vital role in other atmospheric processes such as cloud formation, radiative transfer and monsoon etc. Though there are several studies reported on different aspects of atmospheric aerosols, but most of the findings are sort of data reporting based on short term observations. Hence, there is need to investigate the atmospheric aerosols in order to demonstrate local and regional phenomenon on the basis of long term datasets.