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Lidar Optical and Microphysical Characterization of Tropospheric and Stratospheric Fire Smoke Layers Due to Canadian Wildfires Passing over Naples (Italy)
Damiano, R.; Amoruso, S.; Sannino, A.; Boselli, A. Lidar Optical and Microphysical Characterization of Tropospheric and Stratospheric Fire Smoke Layers Due to Canadian Wildfires Passing over Naples (Italy). Remote Sens.2024, 16, 538.
Damiano, R.; Amoruso, S.; Sannino, A.; Boselli, A. Lidar Optical and Microphysical Characterization of Tropospheric and Stratospheric Fire Smoke Layers Due to Canadian Wildfires Passing over Naples (Italy). Remote Sens. 2024, 16, 538.
Damiano, R.; Amoruso, S.; Sannino, A.; Boselli, A. Lidar Optical and Microphysical Characterization of Tropospheric and Stratospheric Fire Smoke Layers Due to Canadian Wildfires Passing over Naples (Italy). Remote Sens.2024, 16, 538.
Damiano, R.; Amoruso, S.; Sannino, A.; Boselli, A. Lidar Optical and Microphysical Characterization of Tropospheric and Stratospheric Fire Smoke Layers Due to Canadian Wildfires Passing over Naples (Italy). Remote Sens. 2024, 16, 538.
Abstract
In Summer 2017, huge wildfires in the British Columbia region (Canada) led to the injection of a remarkably high concentration of biomass burning aerosol in the atmosphere. These aerosol masses reached the city of Naples, Italy, since the end of August 2017, where they were characterized by means of a multiwavelength lidar and a sun-sky-lunar photometer. Here we report on the optical and microphysical properties of this aerosol in an intriguing condition, occurring on 4th September 2017, which is characterized by an interesting multi-layered vertical distribution of the aerosol. The Lidar profiles highlighted the presence of four aerosol layers, with two located in the lower troposphere and other two at stratospheric altitudes. A rather thorough characterization of the biomass burning aerosol was carried out. The aerosol depolarization ratio showed an increasing dependence on the altitude with averaged values of 2-4% for the tropospheric layers, which are indicative of almost spherical smoke particles, and larger values in the stratospheric layers, suggestive of aspheric particles. Lidar-derived size distributions were retrieved for the first three aerosol layers, highlighting a higher particle concentration in the fine mode fraction for the layers observed at higher altitude. A dominance of fine particles in the atmosphere (Fine Mode Fraction > 0.8) with low absorption properties (absorption AOD < 0.0025 and SSA > 0.97) was also observed over the whole atmospheric column by sun-photometer data. The space-resolved results provided by the lidar data are consistent with the columnar features retrieved by the AERONET sun-photometer, thus evidencing the reliability and capability of lidar characterization of atmospheric aerosol in a very interesting condition of multiple aerosol layers originating from Canadian fires overpassing the observation station.
Keywords
Remote Sensing, Canadian Fire, Microphysical Properties
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
