Burning of fossil fuels in the form of coal or gasoline in thermal power plants, industries, and automobiles is a prime source of nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), a major air pollutant causing health problems. In this paper, spatio-temporal unevenness of NO 2 concentrations via both spaceborne Sentinel-5P and ground-based in situ data have been studied for the period of 2017–2021. Annual and seasonal distribution of TROPOMI-NO 2 depict consistency over the Jharkhand region, highlighting six hotspot regions. As compared to 2019, a notable dip of 11% in the spatial annual average TROPOMI-NO 2 was achieved in 2020, which were elevated again by 22% in 2021 as the lockdown gradually goes out of the picture. Among eight ground-monitoring stations, Tata and Golmuri stations always displayed a higher level of TROPOMI-NO 2 ranges up to 15.2 ×10 15 molecules.cm −2 and 16.9 ×10 15 molecules.cm −2 respectively, as being located in the highly industrialised district of Jamshedpur. A big percentage reduction of up to 30% in TROPOMI-NO 2 has been reported in Jharia and Bastacola stations in Dhanbad in the lockdown phase of 2020 compared to 2019. Good agreement between TROPOMI-NO 2 and surface-NO 2 has been achieved with R = 0.8 and R = 0.71 during winter and post-monsoon respectively. Among four meteorological parameters, TROPOMI-NO 2 was majorly found to be influenced by precipitation, having R = 0.6–0.8 for almost all stations. More advanced satellite algorithms and ground-based data may be used to estimate NO 2 in places where monitoring facilities are limited and thus can help in air pollution control policy. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-023-27236-2.