NEW DELHI: Had most ambient air quality stations in Delhi not gone on the blink during peak pollution hours on Diwali night and the subsequent morning, the capital's average AQI the next day is likely to have been much closer to 'severe' levels than official data suggests, a TOI analysis of hourly air quality readings reveals. Only eight out of a total of 39 stations logged uninterrupted hourly data in the 24 hours till 4pm, Tuesday, a period that spans Diwali night and the morning after. It's this data that went into calculation of the city's AQI for the day after Diwali (Oct 21).

While there are at times gaps in the hourly AQI data, the scale of the outage this Diwali was quite unprecedented. A total of 173 hours of AQI data went missing across 31 stations. Nearly all of this outage,

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