Characteristics of aerosol at a lower atmospheric layer in DRAGON field campaign
Abstract
Air pollution arises severely over East Asia with the rapid economic development nowadays. Monitoring the atmospheric environment, as one of the purposes, an intensive field campaign, Distributed Regional Aerosol Gridded Observation Networks (DRAGON), was carried out in the spring of year 2012, led by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). At that time, atmospheric phenomena such as Yellow sand and haze events were observed at Nara in the western part of Japan, as one of the DRAGON observation sites. The atmospheric events were characterized with the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) data. As a result of the data analysis, it was found that more light-absorbing and smaller particles dominated at the lower than upper atmospheric layer for the Kosa event in particular. A backward trajectory analysis suggested that the Yellow sand event traveled over the East Asian industrial cities, which could lead to a mixture of sand and air pollutants with moderate particle size and light-absorptivity. In addition, visibility observation was evaluated quantitatively with AERONET data in the DRAGON campaign since eye observation was inherently semi-quantitative. The extinction coefficient estimated from visibility was compared to that from AERONET. As a result, it was found that the extinction coefficients were generally consistent to each other. But there were some discrepancies, which could be caused with the atmospheric phenomena or aerosol types. It is confirmed that visibility is strongly influenced with aerosols in the case of severe atmospheric phenomena in particular.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFM.A21D0072K
- Keywords:
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- 0305 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE Aerosols and particles