Meteorological effects on ambient air quality perturbations of some criteria pollutants in northern Nigeria industries

Abstract

Air pollution levels vary over time depending on pollution source location, emission dynamics, and meteorological situation. Thus, Realistic pollutant concentration predictions for a certain period of time remain challenging. This study x-rayed criteria pollutant levels emitted from two prominent industries in Kano Using a HAT 200 PMX detector and an Altair 5X multi-gas detector on a pilot scale. Mean pollutants monitored are from 8 to 24 µg m−3 for PM2.5, 17–50 µg m−3 for PM10, 4–16 µg m−3 for CO, 3–15 µg m−3 for SO2 and 31–52 µg m−3 for NO2. These results are promising except CO levels that exceeded 11.4 µg m−3 limit. With a coefficient of determination (r2) ranging from 0.6 to 0.8, there is a substantial positive association between the monthly mean concentration (MMA) and monthly maximum average concentrations (MMC) during 24 h in the two sites. A fair evaluation of the probabilities of distributed hazardous concentrations in all the locations under study was indicated by the excellent association between the MMA and MMC values displayed throughout the 24 h. The multiple regression coefficients of the different meteorological variables’ effect on the pollutants concentrations clearly show that higher PM2.5 and PM10 values are as a result of dust resuspension due to strong winds, seasonal dust transport, relative humidity and temperature. In contrast, the concentration of the gaseous pollutants was observed to increase when the temperature and relative humidity were high. However, it was observed that high wind speed and direction will reduce the concentrations of gaseous pollutants in the air as revealed by the multiple regression equations. The high levels of CO concentrations found from the sources can be regulated by industrial gas absorbers or complete combustion.