UAE air samples to be scrutinised

Dubai: Air samples have been collected all week long to monitor air pollution in the UAE by researchers from the American University of Sharjah.

Samples from each emirate have been pumped into canisters to analyse whether air pollution is highly prevalent here.

"We want to see if the air we breathe which we think is clean, is really clean," said Professor Tariq Majeed, Assistant professor of Physics at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) and principal researcher.

Majeed said the samples were not collected from highways but from different areas including parks and the tops of buildings.

"We didn't want to capture air from highways which we know is polluted from the exhausts. We also made sure the wind pattern facing us was not from city to ocean because again the wind would be carrying pollution from the city," he said, speaking on the search for clean air.

Harmful

"We wanted to get a good sample of mixed air."

The research has been called for and funded by the Ministry of Presidential Affairs in Abu Dhabi and will be undertaken alongside the UAE Meteorological Department and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

"We know that there are about 100 to 150 hazardous compounds which are harmful to human health, animals and the environment and we will see how many of these are here, but we suspect that they are here," said Majeed. The air study is part of a year-long campaign to observe ozone levels over the UAE.

Previous research discovered a level of ozone which was around 30 to 40 per cent higher than the levels over nearby stations in Isfahan and New Delhi.

Unnaturally high ozone levels are hazardous to humans, animals and plant health.

Different research models show that the region is a hot spot for the level of ozone reacting with petrol chemicals which is a precursor of smog, according to Majeed.

"Some of the molecules have a long lifespan and can travel with the wind. Perhaps we create 80 per cent of the pollution or 50 per cent and the rest is coming from elsewhere," said Majeed.

The results of the observations will be presented at the European Geophysical Union Conference to be held in Vienna in April this year, and a manuscript will subsequently be prepared for possible publication in an international journal.