Indian Central Pollution Board and The Energy and Resources Institute of India

Air quality forecasting and mapping for New Delhi

VITO has been active in India for the last 15 years and has developed partnerships with the government, civil society organizations, public and private sector companies in India. VITO activities in the region are led by Dr Ibrahim Hafeezur Rehman, Director VITO Operations, supported by Dr. Jente Broeckx, VITO’s business and relationship representative for India. 

Air quality monitoring stations across India are relatively sparse compared to many EU regions.  Furthermore, very few cities forecast air quality levels for the next few days.  In 2018-2019, TERI on behalf of the Indian Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) evaluated VITO’s OPAQ spatial mapping and forecasting tool for use in India. The aim to assess its suitability for use by Indian pollution control boards in identifying air quality hotspots across their cities and generating forecasts (of air quality) so they can take adaptive measures for reducing the exposure (to severely high episodic air pollutant concentrations).

OPAQ was successfully set-up, validated and tested for the city of Delhi. The CPCB use the simple OPAQ desktop user interface to manually generate and evaluate the forecasts on a daily basis and generate the spatial maps for chosen time periods e.g. to assess recent episodes and assess seasonal trends.