NASA shares scary image of how air pollution erupted in northern India
New Delhi : Winter filling northern India with smog is not new and one of the primary reasons behind this is the stubble burning and flow of air that sets air pollution to the maximum limits. This year the situation was so bad that the pollution was even visible from the space.
NASA has shared a picture from space where the air pollution can be seen along with the reason behind the pollution. Photos tweeted by NASA Earth show “heightened fire activity in Northwestern India as farmers burn off excess paddy straw after the rice harvest.
Farmers in regions like Punjab and Haryana use fire as a quick and cheap way to get rid of stubble, while making the land more fertile at the same time.
In a blog post, NASA said that while the lingering monsoon rains have kept fire activity at low levels for a few weeks longer than usual, on November 11, the agency’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite acquired a natural-colour image of a river of smoke streaming from fires in Punjab and Haryana towards Delhi. The blog post also said that fires in Northern Pakistan likely contributed towards some of the smoke as well.
“Looking at the size of the plume on November 11 and the population density in this area, I would say that a conservative estimate is that at least 22 million people were affected by smoke on this one day," Pawan Gupta, a Universities Space Research Association (USRA) scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center said in the blog post.
In a Twitter thread, The Weather Channel India also explained the whole phenomenon, citing the image from NASA. “The images captured by @NASA underline the magnitude of the #StubbleBurning problem by depicting a massive “river of smoke" originating from fires in Punjab, Haryana and even north Pakistan, stretching towards Delhi," The Weather Channel India’s Twitter thread said.
