A fluorescence lidar for seamlessly connecting individual observations of the global environmental systems

It is commonly said that the global environment structure is formed from the atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and biosphere, which are natural environment systems. In addition to this, we add another system “livingsphere” which is an artificial system, but holds strong relations between the daily lives of humans and the natural systems. It would then be appropriate to consider the global environment structure with the idea that natural systems and the artificial one are interconnected. We propose using fluorescence as a common parameter to understand the interconnection. Since a large variety of substances exhibit their own unique auto-fluorescence spectrum more or less if they are irradiated by light, they are good targets for fluorescence lidars. Lidar observation results about substances moving freely among the systems might offer information about the interconnection of each type of environment system. In this presentation, we show several experiments done using the fluorescence lidar we have developed for observing aerosol in the atmosphere, lake/river water quality in the hydrosphere, vegetation growth status in the biosphere, and pre-observing ground surface substances in the geosphere and waste substances of daily necessities in the livingsphere. We also describe a fluorescence database which is an EEM (Excitation-Emission-Matrix) of substances found elsewhere in the systems, and discuss an adaptation of the database to the atmospheric aerosols observation done by the fluorescence lidar.