Deepavali air lingers into morning as Hyderabad celebrates it with a bang

Air Quality Index measures the fine particulate matter with under 2.5 microns diameter referred as PM 2.5.

Pollution levels were off the charts late on Monday night and early Tuesday morning as Hyderabad celebrated Deepavali with one of the longest and loudest burst of crackers.

The predominantly residential areas of Sanathnagar, New Malakpet, Somajiguda and Ramachandrapuram monitoring stations’ air quality index peaked at 500 at 11 p.m and stayed there till early morning, data accessed from the Pollution Control Board website showed. While the Nacharam monitoring stations peaked at 446 at 11 p.m.

Air Quality Index measures the fine particulate matter with under 2.5 microns diameter referred as PM 2.5. The Central Pollution Control Board classifies AQI above 400 as severe with a warning “affects healthy people and seriously impacts those with existing diseases”.

At 5 a.m., the Sanathnagar monitoring station had AQI on par with Delhi’s Wazirpur at 314. The AQI peaked in Sanathnagar at 10 p.m. when the monitoring station recorded 759 µg/m³. At 6 p.m., before the crackers started going off, the AQI was a healthy 53 in the area. The U.S. Consulate General’s air pollution monitoring station that covers the area of Secundarabad logged 377 AQI at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, classified as ‘hazardous’ according to the EPA of the US.

The Sanathnagar monitoring station which was the only monitoring station that recorded pm 2.5 beyond 500 µg/m³ peaked at 759 at 10 p.m and began to drop below 298 at 4 a.m.

The Telangana State Pollution Control Board has a special purpose Deepavali ambient air quality monitoring which averaged 81 µg/m³ for PM 2.5 in 2021 and 64 µg/m³ in 2020. The data is averaged over 24 hours by the PCB.