Influence of Meteorological Parameters on Air Quality at Hashemite University , Jordan

Four threshold air pollutants (SO2, NO, NO2, and O3) in addition to meteorological parameters were monitored at the Campus of the Hashemite University (HU) for two years (1/1/2012 through 30/12/013 ). Correlations between air pollution and meteorological parameters were derived. The results showed that O3 has a positive correlation with air temperature, wind speed and wind direction, but has a negative correlation with the relative humidity (RH). SO2 was found to have a negative correlation with the RH and wind speed, but positive correlation with air temperature. NO has negative correlation with air temperature, RH, and wind speed. And finally, NO2 has a negative correlation with RH and wind speed, but it has positive correlation with air temperature. Justify the reasons in brief with recommendations to improve the air quality Article History Received: 12 July 2017 Accepted: 13 August 2017


Introduction
Air pollution in North Africa and the Middle East is receiving increase attention due to its health consequences 1,2,3,4 .The Middle East is impacted by frequent dust storms in addition to regional long range transport of air pollution, carried by winds from three neighboring continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia 5 .The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan with a population of eleven million and a land area of 89,000 square kilometers, has undergone an unprecedented rate of growth in the last fifteen years due to regional political crises.Rapid development of the industrial sector, coupled with the lack of zoning and environmental protection legislation, has contributed to the deterioration of the Jordanian environment.For example, emissions from motor vehicles or old industrial establishments are not regulated throughout the country 6 .Anthropogenic sources of air pollution in north Jordan include motor natural dust, vehicles, utility, smelters, cement factories, and open burning.The

Current World Environment
Journal Website: www.cwejournal.orgISSN: 0973-4929, Vol. 12, No. (2) 2017, Pg. 211-221 city of Zarqa at the middle region in Jordan where the Hashemite University Campus (HUC) is located is exhibiting rapid growing industrial activities with a population of about one million inhabitants 7 .It contains more than 35% of the Jordanian industry by number including an oil refinery, a thermal power plant, steel factories, a pipe factory, a cement factory, a fertilizers factory, a waste water treatment plant, as well as several other small industrial facilities 4 .As a result of such concentrated anthropogenic activities, air quality in Zarqa is questionable.This paper aims at studying air quality at HUC and examined the influence of weather conditions on the concentrations of NO, NO2, SO2, and Ozone.More than 40,000 students and employees are spending most of their daily hours inside the campus, which is located downwind from the oil refinery and the thermal power plant.

Sampling location
The Hashemite University (Figure 1) is a public Jordanian university commissioned in the academic year 1995/1996.It has become one of the largest universities in Jordan.Total area of the campus is about 8500 hectares; 15% of which are designated for buildings, roads, sport facilities and other structures.The rest is meant to be planted by different tress, but in reality only one fourth of the campus is planted with olive trees.The Hashemite University has 13 Colleges including the Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment which owns and operates the air quality monitoring station that is deployed to collect required data for this study.Analyzer (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, MA-USA).Mention reference for methodology 7 .

Statistical Analysis
Collected air quality data was exported into SPSS software format in order to perform advanced statistical analysis including basic statistics; temporal variability and correlations multivariate.

Statistical characterization of climatic variables and air pollutants
Data analyses were started by calculating ordinary statistics including mean, standard deviation (SD), maximum, minimum, Coefficient of Variation (CV), Skewness, and Kurtosis (Table 1).

Multivariance Correlation between Climatic Variables and Air Pollutants
The Multivariance method is deployed to retrieve correlations between air pollutants and basic meteorological parameters.Results are summarized in Table (

Conclusion
The findings of this study show that variation trends of SO 2 , NO, NO 2 , NO x and O 3 correlate well with meteorological conditions parameters.O 3 demonstrates a positive correlation with air temperature, wind speed and wind direction and a negative correlation with the relative humidity.SO 2 has a negative correlation with the relative humidity and wind speed and a positive correlation with air temperature.NO shows a negative correlation with air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed.And NO 2 demonstrates a negative correlation with relative humidity and wind speed and a positive correlation with air temperature.

Acknowledgment
We are grateful to all staff in air quality monitoring station in the research and teaching laboratory in the faculty of natural resources and environment inside the campus of the Hashemite University for the logistic support to conduct our current research work.

table 1 : descriptive statistics for Air Pollutants and climatic variables
temporal Variation of OxidesThe results of linear regression analyses for SO 2, NO, NO 2 , NO x and O s in time, daily, monthly, and yearly basis, using ANOVA tests, are presented in Tables2-5, respectively.The results indicate that the changes are not exactly linear, however the attenuations could be attributed to many factors such as human induced activities (e.g.daily factories working hours, vacations, diversity of burning fuel type, factory malfunctions, etc) or could be attributed to climatic variables as temperature, wind speed and relative humidity.The severity of the change in pollutant concentration with time can be estimated by the magnitude of the slope.

table 9 : Correlation between air pollutants and meteorological
9): Based on the findings presented in Table (9), the following remarks are derived: RH%, O 3 , weak positive relationship with temperature, SO 2 and wind Speed, moderate positive relationship with NO, and strong positive relationship with NO x .NO x has weak negative relationship with temperature, wind direction, and moderate negative relationship with Wind speed, O 3 and weak to moderate positive relationship with SO 2 , RH% and strong positive relationship with NO, NO 2 .