Journal article
Air quality and health impact of 2019-20 Black Summer megafires and COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia
Robert G Ryan, Jeremy D Silver, Robyn Schofield
ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION | ELSEVIER SCI LTD | Published : 2021
Abstract
Poor air quality is an emerging problem in Australia primarily due to ozone pollution events and lengthening and more severe wildfire seasons. A significant deterioration in air quality was experienced in Australia's most populous cities, Melbourne and Sydney, as a result of fires during the so-called Black Summer which ran from November 2019 through to February 2020. Following this period, social, mobility and economic restrictions to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic were implemented in Australia. We quantify the air quality impact of these contrasting periods in the south-eastern states of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) using a meteorological normalisation approach. A Random Fo..
View full abstractRelated Projects (3)
Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
Awarded by Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes
Awarded by Australian Research Council's Discovery project: Tackling Atmospheric Chemistry Grand Challenges in the Southern Hemisphere
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors thank Sean Watt at the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage for assistance in accessing NSW air quality data. Similarly, we are grateful to the Victorian Environmental Protection Agency for making available air quality monitoring for study. We are grateful to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for access to meteorological information through http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/.This study was funded by the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (CE110001028), the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CE170100023), the Australian Research Council's Discovery project: Tackling Atmospheric Chemistry Grand Challenges in the Southern Hemisphere (DP160101598) and the Dr Albert Shimmins Memorial Fund (through the University of Melbourne).