Abstract
The EOLE multi-wavelength aerosol Ramandepolarization lidar, and the AIAS depolarization lidar, in synergy with a sun photometer (CIMEL), were used, in the period 2007-2016, to provide the vertical profiles of the aerosol optical properties over Athens, Greece. More than 30 biomass burning events (fresh and aged smoke particles) were observed, with smoke layers between 1.5 up to 4-5 km height, while their duration ranged from 1-3 days. Lidar ratio (LR) values ranged from 40-105 sr (at 355 nm) and from 40-100 sr (at 532 nm), while the linear particle depolarization ratio (LPDR) at both 355 and 532 nm, remained <7%. The extinction-related Ångström exponent (AEa) at 355 nm/532 nm) ranged from 0.3 to 2.1. Additionally, a case of a near-range transport of biomass burning aerosols arriving over Athens up to 4 km height, between 27 and 28 June 2016, was studied. For this case, we found LRs of the order of 70±5 sr (355 nm) and 65±15 sr (532 nm) and AEa(355 nm/532 nm) around 1.
Highlights
Wildfires play a substantial role in terrestrial ecosystems and have severe atmospheric and climatic effects due to the emission of huge quantities of gases
For the period 19792013 large wildfires caused a doubling of global burnable area strongly affected by the prolonged fire weather seasons in conjunction with an increased frequency of long fire weather seasons after 1996 [2]
The Athens Raman depolarization lidar system (EOLE) was run in parallel with the AIAS depolarization lidar, in the frame of ARIADNE, the Greek lidar network [18]. Both systems are based in the Laser Remote Sensing Unit (LRSU) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) (37.9oN, 23.6oE, 200 m a.s.l.)
Summary
Wildfires play a substantial role in terrestrial ecosystems and have severe atmospheric and climatic effects (e.g. emission/production of global warming gases/aerosols: CO2, O3, aerosol particles, etc.) due to the emission of huge quantities of gases. Wildfire and wood burning atmospheric emissions contain/produce greenhouse gases like CO2, CH4, NOx, NMHCs, N2O, O3, and other toxic ones, like CO, VOCs, Hg, PAHs, as well as biomass burning aerosols, which strongly affect air quality up to several thousands of kilometers [3] As these aerosols play a substantial role in Earth’s climate (e.g. direct and indirect effect) [3] and human health, it becomes very important to measure their optical, microphysical and chemical properties in a global scale on a long-term basis. Raman lidars have proven to be an appropriate tool in aerosol characterization of biomass burning aerosols, since they can provide the vertical profiles of the aerosol optical (βaer, αaer, LR, LPDR) and microphysical properties with high spatial and temporal resolution during many BB events observed mainly over Europe [10,11,12,13,14,15,16].
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