Aerosol scavenging: model application and sensitivity analysis in the Indian context.

Sulfate aerosols have been found to be the major contributors to precipitation acidity. Thus, in view of the long-term ecological repercussions they have on aquatic ecosystems and their acidity-potential, the present analysis focuses on a case study application of the layer-averaged aerosol-scavenging model (Okita et al., 1996) for predicting values of the wet scavenging coefficient and sulfate concentrations in precipitation samples on the basis of the information available for some selected Indian cities. Through sensitivity analysis (Pandey et al., 1997) the scavenging coefficient has been found to be very strongly dependent on precipitation intensity. Comparison of model predictions has been done with the measured values for Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai in India.