Rain!

What do Athens and the Gialova Lagoon (Pylos) in the pictures have in common, except for the beautiful rainbows?

Clean Air!

Rain brings clean air to our cities. Most of the people living in Greek cities don’t like the rain, but here is one reason why we should see things differently…

Just have a look at the AQ graph and map of Athens below, which shows the Air Quality at our AQ Monitor Station of Thiseio for the days of 12-13 December 2020. You see a spike in Particulate Matter PM2.5 (the nasty one!) in the evening of the 12th  (due to the wood smoke coming from the thousands of wood stoves and fireplaces) that started at around 20:00PM. Then you see a sharp, sudden drop of the PM2,5 at around 22:30. That sharp drop is due to the rain. When the rain started, the water falling from the sky literally caught the PM2,5 particles to the ground with it. And the air remained clean for a few hours until the rain stopped.

So, in winter we should be grateful to rainy days that help us breathe a cleaner air and stay healthier.

Another weather feature that cleans the dirty air from our cities is, of course, wind, but we will talk about it another time…