Impact on Changes of Air Quality in Xiamen Airport During  Covid-19 Lockdown

Emission reductions from transportation sector during COVID-19 lockdown significantly lowered NO 2 concentration in urban areas. Due to the reduction of flights, it would be interesting to know if such an intervention would really affect air quality. Here a generalized additive model was applied to predict NO 2 and PM 2.5 concentrations near Xiamen airport under business-as-usual scenario (no flight-ban) and compared it with the observed levels during the lockdown. The result indicates that NO 2 concentrations decreased to a much greater extent than PM 2.5 due to the lockdown policies. Therefore changes in airport-related emissions during the lockdown did have a discernable impact on local air quality. Contribution of airport-related emissions to this reduction in NO 2 was small. In contrast, the reduction from flight-ban reduced PM 2.5 concentrations by ~13.2%, while NO 2 decreased by only ~0.7%. Thus, impact of airport operations on the nearby community is underappreciated.