The Impact of Changes in Anthropogenic Activity Caused by COVID-19 Lockdown on Reducing Nitrogen Dioxide Levels in Thailand Using Nighttime Light Intensity

Nutnaree Thongrueang (), Narumasa Tsutsumida and Tomoki Nakaya
Additional contact information
Nutnaree Thongrueang: Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-0845, Japan
Narumasa Tsutsumida: Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, Saitama 338-8570, Japan
Tomoki Nakaya: Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-0845, Japan

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 5, 1-12

Abstract: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first identified in Wuhan, China and has since become a pandemic. Thailand’s first lockdown started in the middle of March 2020, restricting anthropogenic activities and inter-provincial traffic. There are few studies on the association between nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) levels and human activity, primarily because of the difficulty in identifying the changes in anthropogenic activities at a high geographical resolution. Here, we have highlighted satellite-based nighttime light (NTL) as an indicator of anthropogenic activities and investigated the relationship between NTL and reductions in NO 2 levels during Thailand’s first lockdown in 2020. We applied geographically weighted regression (GWR) to analyze the regional relationship between NTL and changes in NO 2 levels during the first lockdown. Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite observation indicated that the NO 2 levels decreased by 10.36% compared with those of the same period in 2019. The level of NTL decreased in most urban and built-up (31.66%) categories. According to GWR results, NTL and NO 2 levels represent a positive local correlation around the country’s central, western, and northern parts and negative correlations in the peripheral regions. These findings imply that NTL observations can be used to monitor changes in NO 2 levels caused by urban anthropogenic activities.

Keywords: air pollution; COVID-19; nitrogen dioxide; anthropogenic activity; nighttime light (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/5/4296/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/5/4296/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:5:p:4296-:d:1082999

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().