Effects of COVID-19 lockdown measures on nitrogen dioxide and black carbon concentrations close to a major Italian motorway

Abstract

During the first half of 2020, the Italian government imposed several restrictions to limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic: at the beginning of March, a heavy lockdown regime was introduced leading to a drastic reduction of traffic and, consequently, traffic-related emissions. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of these restrictions on pollutant concentrations close to a stretch of the Italian A22 motorway lying in the Alpine Adige valley. In particular, the analysis focuses on measured concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and black carbon (BC). Results show that, close to the motorway, NO₂ concentrations dropped by around 45% during the lockdown period with respect to the same time period of the previous 3 years. The equivalent analysis for BC shows that the component related to biomass burning, mostly due to domestic heating, was not particularly affected by the restrictions, while the BC component related to fossil fuels, directly connected to traffic, plummeted by almost 60% with respect to the previous years. Since atmospheric concentrations of pollutants depend both on emissions and meteorological conditions, which can mask the variations in the emission regime, a random forest algorithm is also applied to the measured concentrations, in order to better evaluate the effects of the restrictions on emissions. This procedure allows for obtaining business-as-usual and meteorologically normalized time series of both NO₂ and BC concentrations. The results derived from the random forest algorithm clearly confirm the drop in NO₂ emissions at the beginning of the lockdown period, followed by a slow and partial recovery in the following months. They also confirm that, during the lockdown, emissions of the BC component due to biomass burning were not significantly affected, while those of the BC component related to fossil fuels underwent an abrupt drop.