Monitoring of Atmospheric Particles in Beijing and Dunhuang Using a Raman Lidar with Enhanced Dynamics

In high urbanized areas, the atmospheric particulate matter concentration (the so called PM) can exceeds the healthy limit values. Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, industrial activities, and ground transport contribute to measured PM exceedance. Natural contribution is originated mainly from dust storms and volcanic eruptions. The Gobi desert, for instance, is the major source of mineral dust in China, that is one of the most interesting regions for aerosol study being surrounded by the main sources of anthropogenic and natural aerosol. On the base of the above considerations, the need of a new advanced scanning lidar system raised in order to better understand the formation, emission and diffusion of particulate from natural and anthropic sources and to evaluate their relative contribution, to characterize the chemical and physical properties of atmospheric aerosols, their spatial and temporal distribution and the main transport mechanisms. To this aim, a new, versatile and portable Raman scanning lidar system has been designed and developed in the frame of the AMPLE (Aerosol Multi-wavelength Polarization Lidar Experiment) project, the first action of the recently founded China-Italy Laser Remote Sensing Joint Research Center between the National Consortium of Italian Universities for the Physical Science of the Matter (CNISM) and the Beijing Research Institute for Telemetry (BRIT). The AMPLE lidar device has been installed at the Beijing Research Institute for Telemetry in the Beijing city area, which is strongly affected from anthropogenic pollution and sand dust from Gobi desert in order to carry out 4-D (space and time) imaging of the atmospheric aerosol distributions, their optical properties, and microphysical characterization. A first demonstrative measurement campaign has been performed on May 2013 in Beijing, while on August 2013 AMPLE has been carried in Dunhuang close to the Gobi desert and far away from the urban area, in order to study sand dust directly at source. Results of those measurements are described in this paper.