A GIS BASED STUDY ON AIR QUALITY ASSESSMENT ALONG THE ROADSIDE ENVIRONMENT IN FAISALABAD, PAKISTANWASIM JAVED, GHULAM MURTAZA AND HAMAAD RAZA AHMADAbstract The assessment of ambient air quality was done along a roadside environment in Faisalabad metropolitan in terms of airborne particulate matter (PM), ambient smoke and noise levels during a month (May, 2012). GIS based spatial interpolated maps of the measured pollutants were drawn with the help of GIS software (ArcView 9.3) by using the inverse distance weighted (IDW) method. It was observed that air quality was worse at traffic congested locations and sites proximal to industries where pollutant levels highly exceeding the standard values proposed by US-EPA. GIS based spatial interpolated maps depicted numerous higher concentration ‘hotspots’ for each of the measured pollutant in the study area. It can be seen from the maps that the industrial sites were heavily polluted whereas the urban/traffic sites were moderately polluted as compared to other rural sites, which is a cause of concern for the inhabitants of these areas. It can be concluded that the area along the road under study is considered as highly polluted that may imply potential health threat to residents and immediate measures should be taken to reduce the concentrations of pollutants and thus improving the air quality.
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