Delhi’s air quality likely to slip to ‘very poor’ category

New Delhi : The overall air quality of the national capital deteriorated from the ‘moderate’ to ‘poor’ category on Thursday and is likely to slip to the ‘very poor’ category by Friday, according to the Centre-run System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR).

As predicted by SAFAR, the AQI is now forecasted to deteriorate rapidly and slip to very poor category by tomorrow and deteriorate further to the higher end of very poor category by 29th October, says the forecast report by SAFAR.

According to the Central Pollution Control Board, Delhi’s air quality index (AQI) stood at 232 at 4 pm on Wednesday based on the 37 monitoring stations installed across the city.

As per SAFAR, stubble burning is one of the main reasons behind the deteriorating condition of air quality in the national capital. “Effective fire count of stubble burning in the northwest region of Delhi is 656 and its share in PM2.5 is 16% as transport-level winds are northwesterly…,” SAFAR said in its bulletin.

“Calm local winds combined with highly favorable transport level winds (North-north westerly) at 900-950 mb height enhance stubble burning related intrusion… Any increase in fire counts in the next 3 days would increase finer particle levels of Delhi,” added the bulletin.