DUSTER lidar: Transatlantic transport of aerosol particles from the Sahara and other sources: first results from the recently installed lidar and sunphotometer in Natal/Brazil

摘要

The lidar confederative network for monitoring optical properties of aerosol on Latin America, LALINET, faces an important challenger to cover a large area of Latin America with so few lidar systems. Currently in Brazil there are only three operative lidar systems, two operating on Southeastern region and other on North region of Brazil. Taking into accounting the large dimension of Brazilian territory there is a lack of lidar system monitoring in several regions. In 2014 Laser Environmental Application Laboratory (LEAL) at Nuclear and Energy Research Institute (IPEN) together with Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), have started the first efforts to install a depolarization lidar system at the city of Natal-RN (5°50′29″ S ,35°11′57″ W, 0 m asl), in the Northeast region of Brazil. This new lidar station intends to be in the future integrated to the LALINET network, and has as a first aim to detect and to identify aerosol layers from Saharan dust and biomass burning type arriving from African continent. To examine these transports it is paramount to have a temporally and spatially well resolved observational platforms, which will be able to describe with accuracy the transport patterns followed by these aerosol layers over the Atlantic. To yield a good coverage based on the previously mentioned requirements satellite-based platforms are very well suited, but unless a geostationary system is provided a reasonable temporal representativeness may not be achieved. Our current study is devoted to the first results aiming to detect and identify aerosol layers arriving over the Northeastern region of the South American continent, with a lidar and a sun-photometer recently installed in the city of Natal. Here we present the first aerosol observation results with the lidar system and the sunphotometer carried out from January through May 2016 with the indication of potential dust and other-type aerosol layers through some backscatter profiles.