Acid Rain

A Secondary Pollutant

 

Acid rain formation

Introduction

Smith first used the term ‘‘acid rain’’ and expresses so many principal ideas that we use today for understanding this phenomenon (Smith 1872).What is Acid Rain? Acid rain is mainly caused due to the release of Sulphur dioxide (SO 2) and oxides of nitrogen (NO x), into the atmosphere and when these get mixed into the pure water of the atmosphere, it makes the rainwater acidic. Mainly human activities lead to acid rain as the Sulphur dioxide is formed when the coal is burned, and car exhaust fumes contain Sulphur (Bolan and Hedley, 2003). Fossils Fuel combustion alone produces about 91 million tons of Sulphur dioxide and nitrogen (Hameed and Dignon, 1992). Most of the emissions are from the industrialized areas as they use so many products in the industries that emit the acid which makes the acid rain.