Heavy rain has brought down air pollution levels in Delhi

It has been reported that New Delhi has been suffering from heavy rain over the past few days.

Although it may be an annoyance to residents, the good news is that it has brought down the level of air pollution in the national capital, a scientist said.

Indeed, it is thought that the air in Delhi is the cleanest that it has been in the past two months.

For a long while, Delhi has been suffering from extraordinarily high levels of air pollution - levels which the Ministry Of Earth Sciences’ Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) had called harmful.

However, with the new rainfall, Delhi has got out of the worst it seems.

"Delhi is finally out of poor air quality after two months. Delhi’s air is going to be much better during the next three days due to rain and comparatively high temperature," Gufran Beig, a scientist at IITM, said.

"For the first time since November 2012, Delhi citizens are going to breathe relatively cleaner air for next three days."

"The level of particulate matters PM2.5 is predicted to fall sharply below 60 microgram/cubic metre during the next two days as compared to last weeks value of 200 microgram/cubic metre, during which the air quality was poor," he said.

Up until last week, the PM2.5 level was fluctuating consistently from “very poor” to “poor".

At some points, air pollution levels reached as high as 250 microgram/cubic.

“In November last year, Delhi was under the grip of critical air quality due to the coincidence of post westerly disturbance cooling and sudden change in winds coming originating from crop residue burning,” said Sunil Peshin, in-charge of SAFAR.

“The current misty weather is also due to westerly disturbances, which has helped in bringing bring down the level of particulate matters considerably,” he added.