Monitoring Atmospheric Aerosols Over the Urmia Lake by CALIPSO and a Ground Based Depolarized Lidar

Hamid R Khalesifard,Salar Alizadeh,Fatemeh Ghomashi,Hossein Panahifar,Ruhollah Moradhaseli,D Liu,F Moshary,B Gross,Y Wu,Y Wang

doi:10.1051/epjconf/202023702025

Abstract

The Urmia Lake, a hypersaline lake in Northwest Iran is facing a severe drying scenario. We have installed an azimuthal scanning depolarized backscatter lidar in the coast of the lake to monitor the atmospheric aerosols that may originate from the dried lake bed. We also used the CALIPSO recordings to monitor the aerosol optical depth and particulate depolarization ratio just over the lake. Recordings of the lidar and CALIPSO both show that dry salt particles can be found in the atmospheric boundary layer over the lake especially in summer times. Also CALIPSO data in synergy with HYSPLIT model show that the lake is not an intense aerosol source comparing to neighboring sources like the Mesopotamia region but it is under their influence.

Highlights

Khoy Up Urmia Tabriz Maragheh Downscanning depolarized elastic backscatter lidar (SDL) location 37.343794 N 45.294744 E 1282 m AMSLThe Urmia Lake (UL) in Northwest Iran (Figure 1) once was the second largest permanent hypersaline lake in the world
On doing this we have used the recordings of the CALIPSO satellite over the UL since its launching time and a scanning depolarized elastic backscatter lidar (SDL) that we have installed at the western coast of the UL to monitor the atmospheric aerosols just in the vicinity of the lake
The aerosol layers over the Up segment appear at higher altitudes. This can be seen more clearly, when an average would be performed over all recorded layer heights IJlayer 'DVKHG EODFN lines in Figure 4 depict this value for Up (Down) segment as 3.1 (2.5) km

Summary

Introduction

Khoy Up Urmia Tabriz Maragheh DownSDL location 37.343794 N 45.294744 E 1282 m AMSLThe Urmia Lake (UL) in Northwest Iran (Figure 1) once was the second largest permanent hypersaline lake in the world. In this work we are trying to find the types of the particles that may originate from the dried lake bed and investigate how active is the UL as a source for such particles. On doing this we have used the recordings of the CALIPSO satellite over the UL since its launching time and a scanning depolarized elastic backscatter lidar (SDL) that we have installed at the western coast of the UL to monitor the atmospheric aerosols just in the vicinity of the lake.

Methods

Results

Conclusion