India Opened AATAL in Delhi on 24 October 2026, a Laboratory That Reads the Chemistry of the City's Air and Estimates Which Sources Produced It

On 24 October 2026 the Union minister of state for earth sciences opened AATAL, the Integrated Atmospheric Chemistry and Aerosol Toxicity Analysis Laboratory, at the Delhi branch of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). The Ministry of Earth Sciences says it analyses the gases and fine particles in Delhi’s air, estimates in real time which sources produced them, and gives scientists the chemical detail needed to judge how harmful they may be.

The Press Information Bureau (PIB) release, posted that afternoon, names the Ministry’s Secretary, the director of IITM and the Director General of the India Meteorological Department as present at the opening. The laboratory was set up under Mission Mausam, the programme the Union Cabinet approved on 11 September 2024 with an outlay of Rs 2,000 crore over two years. The release says Delhi-NCR was chosen because of serious public concern over air pollution. The mission’s brief, in the Cabinet’s wording, covers monsoon forecasts, alerts for air quality, and extreme weather and cyclones, and its implementing bodies are IMD, IITM and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

What the laboratory analyses

Aerosols are the tiny solid and liquid particles that hang in air. According to the PIB release, AATAL is equipped with advanced instruments to analyse the chemical composition of atmospheric gases and aerosols, including fine particulate matter (PM2.5), metals, toxic elements and other components. The release adds that the capability will let scientists study how pollutants interact and change in the atmosphere.

The same instruments are meant to tell sources apart. The Ministry lists vehicle emissions, industrial activity, burning of biomass and crop residue, construction and road dust, and pollution carried in from surrounding regions. By estimating each one’s relative contribution, the release says, the facility will show which activities are driving poor air at a particular time and where action may work best.

The health side comes from composition. The Minister said the facility would give information on the smaller constituents of pollution, including metallic elements, and explained that pollutants differ in their health implications, so the release says both the makeup of the air and its concentration need to be known. The release says the results can help health authorities understand the risks of different types of particulate pollution.

The Minister described what the lab changes about the public conversation: “Earlier, the discussion would largely revolve around whether the pollution level was 100 or 200.”

The reading on the screen

At the event, the Minister pointed to a display while speaking to reporters. The PIB release records that, at that moment, transport was contributing approximately 25 percent of Delhi’s air pollution, with the overall level at around 180. He said such information could move the response from general assessments to interventions aimed at the sources actually contributing.

That figure is a snapshot of one moment. The release gives no seasonal or annual source shares from the laboratory.

How it connects to AIRWISE

The laboratory is integrated with AIRWISE, IITM’s Air Quality Warning and Integrated Decision Support System for Emissions. The release says AIRWISE combines air-quality forecasts, observations and source-apportionment information, and that its forecasts run at a spatial resolution of 400 metres for the next 72 hours, so the system can assess how pollution varies across different pockets of Delhi. The Minister said the combined capability would give real-time information and forecasts for the next four days.

Dr Sachin Ghude, project director of MAQWS, the IITM warning-system project, said the integrated facility would give early warnings and detailed information on sources including stubble burning, vehicle emissions, construction and road dust. He called the forecasting capability a major technological advance and said India had built a high-resolution system comparable with global forecasting systems, with the potential to extend similar capabilities to other cities.

The forecasting work behind it

IITM’s Delhi forecasting did not start with AATAL. On 15 October 2018 the Ministry of Earth Sciences unveiled an Air Quality Early Warning System for Delhi, built jointly by IITM Pune, the India Meteorological Department and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting. Its release says it combined satellite and ground observations with two atmospheric chemistry models, one based on a model from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and one from the Finnish Meteorological Institute, with predictions available up to 72 hours ahead.

The same day the Ministry released an emission inventory, a catalogue of what is released into the air and by whom, at 400 m by 400 m for Delhi and its fringe. IITM scientists, the release says, involved around 140 students in a mapping campaign of about 37,500 hours, collecting ground-level activity data on 23 different sources of pollution for eight pollutants.

A paper in Scientific Reports on 18 February 2021, by Chinmay Jena, Sachin Ghude and colleagues, describes an operational forecast with a 400 m by 400 m inner domain over Delhi, nested inside a 2 km domain for the National Capital Region and a 10 km outer domain, issuing a 72-hour forecast each day. Tested from October 2019 to February 2020, it found 24 of 37 stations within 30 percent normalised mean bias, and its day-one forecast of “unhealthy” air had a probability of detection of 1.00. For the “severe” category, the paper’s detection score was lower, at 0.34.

Two ways to find a source

IITM already produces source estimates from a model. The Decision Support System described in Geoscientific Model Development on 10 April 2024 was developed at the request of the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) and tags emissions by district, sector and biomass burning to estimate their share of Delhi’s PM2.5. It runs on a 10 km grid and gives five-day forecasts. Its seasonal shares are set beside the older studies in our piece on what Delhi’s air measurements show.

AATAL adds the second route. The PIB release says it will provide “measurement-based evidence” to identify the sources responsible for poor air, prioritise sectors and locations for action, and support coordinated measures across Delhi-NCR. A model estimates sources from inventories of emissions and from weather. A chemical laboratory reads the particles themselves.

What the pollution plan will do with it

CAQM runs the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), which adds restrictions in stages as Delhi’s Air Quality Index (AQI) worsens: Stage I at 201 to 300, Stage II at 301 to 400, Stage III at 401 to 450 and Stage IV above 450, according to Down To Earth. In its account of the September 2024 revision, actions that once waited for three days of “very poor” air can now start from an IITM forecast of the next three days, before conditions worsen.

The PIB release says AATAL’s evidence, combined with AIRWISE forecasts, can strengthen decisions on preventive measures and responses under GRAP. The Minister called for joint work between his Ministry, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, pollution-control authorities and disaster-management agencies. He described the initiative as an example of the whole-of-government approach advocated by the Prime Minister.

What the release leaves open

The “world’s first” description is the Minister’s, and the release names no facility it was compared with. The release does not name the instruments, give a cost, say how the readings will be published or checked against the existing monitoring network, or state whether CAQM has agreed to use them in its orders.