How an El Niño winter could worsen pollution in Delhi

On October 21, the morning after Dusshera, Delhi-NCR woke up to a pollution haze, with the air quality index jumping to 244 – the worst in the last 100 days. This marked the beginning of the air pollution season, and the air is set to get worse through the winter as a result of continued vehicular emissions, construction and stubble burning.

But this year, Delhi and the rest of the Indo-Gangetic plain faces an additional challenge that could worsen the air quality – an El Niño with “unprecedented strength”, expected to peak between November and January.

El Niño is a climate pattern that repeats every few years. Influenced by warming sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, it can increase heat and reduce rainfall across the world. Between the coming months of November and January, the sea surface temperature could rise 3.8 degree Celsius above average, making this year a “Super El Niño” year, the World Meteorological Organisation has predicted.

While El Niño is not itself a source of pollution, meteorological factors associated with it, like temperature and wind speed, can affect the way pollutants mix in the atmosphere, and thus affect air quality.

Gufran Beig, chair professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, and founder-director of...

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