This work reports the study of an afterglow of a low pressure dc pulsed discharges in air with different time durations. A time-dependent kinetic model for both the pulse and the afterglow is presented in order to interpret previous experimental results. The temporal evolution of relevant active species in the plasma is calculated for a pulse duration up to 10 ms. It is shown that the behaviour of N_2(X,v), N_2(A), NO(X), N(~4S) and O(~3P) changes dramatically with the pulse duration, which in turn strongly influences the afterglow results. The role of the N_2(X, v) vibrational distribution function and N_2(A) metastable is studied in detail in order to provide an explanation for measured N_2(B) and N_2(C) fluorescences in the afterglow. The agreement between modeling and experiment can be considered very satisfactory.
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