Tuesday 22 May 2012

Background of Air Quality Monitoring in India

Background of Air Quality Monitoring in India

The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs) are the government agencies responsible for managing air quality at national and state levels. The ground based monitoring networks in India include the National Ambient Monitoring Programme (NAMP) network operated under the guidelines of Central Pollution Control Board, state level air monitoring networks operated by respective State Pollution Control Boards, and other networks operated by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), universities and research groups. Studies on the health impact of air pollution in India have been limited and the high pollution levels in a large number of cities with high population densities are a cause for concern. An example issue in need of improved decision support tools and technologies is the impact on crops due to ozone and climate change, including early warning systems and public service bulletins to targeted communities.
The NAMP network consists of 342 operating stations within 127 cities in 26 states and 4 Union Territories of the country. All these stations monitor sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter (RSPM) and Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) ), Ammonia and Hydrogen Sulphide on every third day.  More than 100 continuous monitoring stations have been also commissioned by CPCB, SPCB’s and the Industry in cities of concern such as Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, etc. Periodically, heavy metals in PM and PAHs are also analyzed from many of these stations.

Major Issues with Air Quality Monitoring System

The present system of measurement does serve a purpose of providing city specific plan however, it has limited role in terms of understanding of little extended region around these cities.  The point measurements from the monitoring stations are thus limited in their temporal frequency and geographic coverage, and lack the spatial continuity to provide a synoptic view of air quality in the region. The current monitoring network also lacks monitoring in rural areas that are impacted by pollution transport downwind of urban and industrialized areas. The other related problem is with regard to data of background against which the cities air quality can be compared. The background data points are very limited compared to urban centric or industrial clusters data from monitoring stations. With the addition of continuous monitoring stations is some cities, issue pertaining to inter-comparison of data within the cities as also across the country, becomes a major concern.

Responses needed

Additional modes of monitoring are needed to better assess air quality and recent developments in the earth observation (EO) systems provide an excellent opportunity to integrate satellite data with surface measurements to support the decision-making processes for effective air quality management.  Presently, these data are not utilized to their full potential for air quality management in India, and are, for the most part, limited to the research community. The opportunity to find, access and understand air quality data from different sources for examining, processing, overlaying and displaying would offer an added dimension to the air quality management processes in the country.
The GEOSS vision provides a structure for environmental data to be easily available through an interoperability framework that allows them to be used via various subsets and combinations in support specific research and decision applications (Figure 1).


Figure 1: GEOSS connecting observation and modeling systems with decision processes

The use of data and their application for air quality achieved in GEOSS through web and data standards would allow disparate data to be accessible to a variety of decision support tools. The GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) on one hand would provide a channel for data providers to register and catalog standards-based web service interfaces to satellite, surface and modeled data, and on the other hand, for data consumers to find and access those data.
The atmospheric composition over India is determined by the sources within India as well as by the contributions from neighboring regions. A full air quality characterization requires a multi-scale approach, consisting of global, regional/national and local perspectives as depicted in Figure 2. Global data, analyses and models provide the broad geographic and chemical pattern and visualize pollutant transport into and out of the Indian sub-continent. Surface observations are inherently local and the analysis of local conditions is necessary for the full understanding of air quality, particularly in mega-cities and industrial areas. Air quality monitoring networks managed by the Indian national agencies provide important observation data that can be augmented with satellite data and model results.
It is anticipated that a key contribution of the proposed project will be the India-scale characterization of air quality facilitated by the Indian and GEOSS Air Quality Communities of Practice (AQ CoPs). The regional/India-scale observations, analyses and modeling results can be synthesized from the combination of global observations provided by the GEO AQ CoP and national observations within India.


Figure 2.  Multi-scale perspective needed for AQ characterization
This proposal focuses on strengthening and developing new capabilities for Indian air quality management activities, which has ample intellectual capacity to benefit from such infusion in a few key areas, and which could be expected to carry the program forward operationally on its own in approximately 3-4 years. This is a reasonable estimate for the development of a prototype system that is ready to be transitioned into an operational system for routine applications based on experience in related projects to develop air quality decision support systems in the U.S.

Technical Scope of Proposed Effort

The work proposed is a collaboration among India and US organizations to develop a prototype integrated air quality information system for India, which is linked to the GEOSS GCI both as an information provider and as a user. The project is expected to encompass three primary activity areas:
  1. Community Building
  2. Advancement of Information Infrastructure, and
  3. Enhancement of Decision Support Systems

Community Building

 A Community of Practice (CoP) is a user-led community of stakeholders, from providers to the final beneficiaries of Earth observation data and information, with a common interest in specific aspects of societal benefits to be realized by GEOSS implementation. Based on experiences with the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Air Quality Workgroup in the United States, and the emerging GEO Air Quality Community of Practice (GEO AQ CoP), a key objective of the proposed effort is to initiate an India Air Quality Community of Practice (IAQ CoP) that could coordinate with peer-level CoPs, such as ESIP and contribute to the international GEO AQ CoP.  Discussions and interactions that stemmed from the development of this GEO Decision Support proposal have already initiated efforts to form the India AQ CoP and interest across the India air quality community is high. The proposed project will help formalize the IAQ CoP and to apply GEOSS principles and best practices.
Using and enhancing the concept of the GEO AQ CoP to develop a process for engaging organizations in a collaborative environment across the Indian air quality research, management and policy communities as well as the global air quality community.  Community building includes fostering education and outreach via demonstrations, workshops and training courses to aid in more widespread use of GEOSS and related systems, and to iteratively improve the process at multiple stages of the project using the feedback from the user community.  The community building activity addresses the task of engaging local resources in the development of the new decision support system, and will be led by the principal team members in India.  The efforts would be directed through the following sub-tasks:
1) Identifying stakeholders, such as air quality researchers and managers in India, and mobilizing information, infrastructure and financial resources
2) Conducting workshops to build capacity for access and utilization of Earth Science Observations for decision-support,
3) Working with stakeholders in indentifying decision-making activities and defining  applications in support of decision-making activities (not sure I understand the rest of the sentence) and engaging in the providing and accessing of data,
4) Setting up India-specific structures to establish and sustain an IAQ-CoP.
The principal team members from India, foresee that the IAQ CoP will begin to engage and coordinate around questions, such as storage, presentation, sharing data, and use of currently available CPCB data; How best to supplement the SPCB procedures for utilization of the CPCB monitoring network for their decision making; Use of SPCB inventory data industry by industry; data system for area and line sources; where are modeling efforts located , and for  scales that are (a) local (b) regional (c) global use of satellite data from ISRO and its usage; need for an operational speciation network with resolution in terms of chemical composition for PM measurements; geographic coverage for urban, rural and background air quality; need to establish the role that the region has to play in the global decision making for global decisions
The IAQ-CoP will be created through scheduling occasions for structured national and regional level symposiums and meetings.  The theme area will be “Practices and Structures for Sustained Air Quality Management in India” and will be supported through commitments from the GOI, Industry and hosted by academic institutions.  Stakeholders will be invited to participate in the first such event, which will include brain storming, establishing a need for systemic approach, demonstrations, sharing from GEOSS experiences, and formulation of pathway for the work in India.  This event will be followed by two similar events where the progress and accomplishments will be shared.  In addition to these events, specific specialty workshops will be conducted on a more frequent and geographically dispersed schedule throughout the country as described in the next section.   While such physical meetings are felt as a need at the initial stages of the formation of CoP, the mode of such meetings would be augmented and phased into a virtual mode through suitable collaboration technologies.

Education and Outreach

An important part of the community-building will be accomplished via end-user training activities.  All training activities will provide hands-on experience with model, satellite, and surface inter-comparisons.  We will also provide end users in India with the skills needed for leveraging the GEOSS Common Infrastructure in order to find and access distributed Earth Science data and tools.  The workshops will be designed to address using multiple types of information (surface observations, satellite observations, emissions models, and air quality models) for conducing air quality analyses and assessments and for conducting those assessments within the GOESS and Air Quality Community Information Infrastructures.  The satellite workshops will have three main components a) Atmospheric satellite remote sensing basics b) Accessing Earth Science Observations via  the GEOSS Common Infrastructure and other online tools; c) Using Satellite Observations, GEOSS Common Infrastructure and web tools for decision-support via hands-on Case Studies.  Satellite trainings will be conducted following the structure of existing NASA Applied Sciences Program Training Workshops (Prados et. al., 2010a) to include hands-on activities for online access, visualization and analysis of satellite imagery. The second type of training will provide in-depth workshops on air quality modeling ,  complementary to the CMAS training to community end users on the use of the air quality models relevant to the India with an emphasis on their synergistic use with Earth observations.  Case Studies on utilization of both satellite and model data will be prepared specifically for India applications to include different types of pollution episodes, which a decision-maker may encounter in India such as long-range transport of industrial pollution or dust storms. 

Advancement of Information Infrastructure

This aspect of the proposed effort focuses on using and enhancing the GEOSS GCI, and community-based extensions thereof, as defined by the data, information and analytical needs of the India air quality research, management and policy communities.  The foundation of this task is the GEOSS Common Infrastructure and the air quality community information infrastructure components developed during the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot – Phase 2 (AIP-2; http://www.ogcnetwork.net/AIP2ERs#AQ) and currently being advanced in AIP-3. The GEOSS Air Quality community has been building entities on top of the GCI to accommodate unique characteristics of air quality data and analysis web services through metadata standards and an associated community catalog (Figure 4). The resulting framework is intended to simplify the process for providers to share their data and provide ways for web applications and decision support systems to connect with the data.
This part of our proposal addresses the task of developing the necessary components for an interoperable network of data and tools to support the air quality science and management efforts in India and connect it with GEOSS. The foundation of this task is the GEOSS Common Infrastructure and the air quality community information infrastructure components developed during the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot – Phase 2 (AIP-2).

Figure 3: An air quality community infrastructure connected with the GEOSS Common Infrastructure
An underlying principle of AIP is the use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with the publish-find-bind protocol, where data services are published to a common registry, search tools allow the finding of those data, and a wide variety of applications and tools can connect to those data for visualization, processing or analysis. Key activities include:
·         Creation of standards-based web service interfaces to satellite, surface and modeled data
·         Registration of web services in a GEOSS air quality community catalog and harvesting of the Community Catalog by the GEOSS Clearinghouse.
·         Access of services through the GEOSS Clearinghouse with AQ Clients and portals for the use of those services in web applications and decision support systems
The publish capability in the information architecture will involve the creation of metadata needed for finding, understanding and using the data. The AQ metadata record developed in AIP-2 is based on the ISO 19115 standard and can be semi-automatically generated based on a combination of metadata extracted from web service descriptions and manually entered information. The generated metadata record is saved into a community catalog that is already registered as a component in the GEOSS Component and Service Registry (CSR). The GEOSS Clearinghouses query the GEOSS CSR for catalogs and then “harvest” the catalogs for their metadata records.
In order to find the data access services in the GEOSS Clearinghouse one has to know what to search for and how to extract the relevant information from the GEOSS Clearinghouse. AIP-2 has helped define this process for AQ-related searches. General search parameters defined by the GEOSS Clearinghouses are used as a first filtering step and then further refined in customized search parameters specific to AQ communities.
Further, subsequent to finding the data for AQ decision-making, there is a need to bind, or use, those data in meaningful applications. The information returned from search results should provide the necessary information to connect those data with processing, visualization or analysis tools of the user’s choice. This aspect of the information infrastructure will be a focus area for the proposed project to define conventions for connecting GEOSS earth observation services with decision support tools.
The end result of this task will be data services that are made available to stakeholders in India through GEOSS along with a capability for users to register data services with GEOSS, and mechanisms to connect those data services for use in decision support systems.

Enhancement of Decision Support Systems

The proposed project  intends to leverage existing data and information systems, tools and methods to facilitate the integration of global and local data from multiple sources (surface-based and satellite measurements, models and analysis tools) to allow air quality management groups to better understand the air quality issues in specific regions of India, and conduct analyses, such as emission source identification, exceptional event analyses, forecasting, assessment of air quality scenarios and identification of air pollution hot spots in the country.
To meet the needs of the intended beneficiaries, the information infrastructure should effectively provide information that can meaningfully enhance decision support systems. The project team has extensive experience in developing information and analysis tools in support of air quality science and management, and also has experience in communicating, collaborating and coordinating with related systems. We seek to leverage implemented technologies, best practices, and existing information systems for application in India.

Existing Systems and Community-oriented Efforts

The proposed project relies on and builds upon previous efforts. An important activity is the assessment of existing systems and capabilities along with determination of how they are best applied to the India air quality problem.

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