Variations Of Selected Criteria Air Pollutants During High Particulate Event

Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Ground Level Ozone (O-3), and Particulate Matter with size less than 10 mu (PM10) are air pollutants measured under the Malaysia Ambient Air Quality Guideline requirements. The focus of this research is the interaction between each criteria pollutant as well as the effects of daytime (DT), nighttime (NT), four monsoon seasons [northeast monsoon (NE), southwest monsoon (SW), 1st intermonsoon (AM) and 2nd intermonsoon (SO)] and high particulate events (HPEs) that occurred in one year towards O-3 concentrations. The hourly concentration trends of air pollutants were compared and contrasted using descriptive analysis and graphical analysis. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to analyze the relationship between PM10 with O-3 and O-3 with NO2. The results show that seasonal variation has the least effect for each pollutant. Even the correlation on each pollutant is less significant, the effect to monthly mean value indicates that HPE has the highest mean value of PM10 concentration at 116.16 mu g/m(3). April-May inter-monsoon has the lowest level of all three air quality parameters with PM10 (24.09 mu g/m(3)), O-3 (5.35 and 8.83 ppb) and NO2 (6.61 and 7.93 ppb), respectively. September-October inter-monsoon has higher mean concentration than April-May (PM10, 53.20 mu g/m(3); O-3, 22.33 ppb and NO2, 8.29 ppb). DT and NT provide the information whereby O-3 and NO2 are highly dependent on the daily human activities and sunlight as these two pollutants are significantly differenced between DT and NT. Besides, the study also showed that the mean concentration of PM10 in Taiping monitoring station has a positive correlation coefficient towards O-3, which indicate that the increase of PM10 will increase O-3. Essentially, during HPE, a high concentration of PM10 induced high formation of O-3 compared to during non-HPE.