|
|
|
Use of Geographical Information System
Rajiv Ranjan Choudhary
Student
Symbiosis Institute of Geoinformatics,
India
Email: rajivranjan_5017@yahoo.co.in
Atmospheric pollution and air quality are among the prominent environmental issues of the 21st century. The study of atmospheric pollutants, mainly due to human activities, has received considerable attention in recent years all over the world for two main reasons firstly, these influence the climate directly by altering the Earth's radiative budget, and secondly space-time variations of pollutants provide unique information on atmospheric behavior needed for environmental pollution, air quality assessment/forecast and operational programmes (Devera et al., 1994).
Geographical information system (GIS) is just the right tool for a user to explore question, integrate, analyze, interpret, evaluate and act on information. For air toxics risk assessment, GIS can be a powerful tool for displaying and analyzing data during the planning, scoping, and problem formulation phases; during the exposure assessment and displaying and evaluating the results of the risk characterization. GIS can be highly useful as a decision support system, as, it allows users to create, utilize and visualize maps of air pollution, population, economic valuations and other types of data. GIS can be used for pollution mapping of vehicular pollutants and to highlight the impact of various inputs; viz, traffic volume, composition, age of vehicles, etc. in terms of emission factors and meteorological parameters. Based on records of pollution variation over a period, the reason behind the changes, direction of increase in pollution and other assessments can easily be detected with the help of GIS. This would assist in reaching the necessary decisions to be taken to control pollution. An attempt has been made in this paper to use the GIS to evaluate the pollution pattern in Pune city suburbs, and analyze steps required for bringing down the pollution level.
|
|
|