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Wide-area remote sensing of air quality: impacts of ITS
Technical Paper
1995-16-0129
Sector:
Language:
English
Abstract
An operational test of a wide-area remote sensing system was
conducted to evaluate its ability to monitor air quality impacts of
traffic events. A light detection and ranging (LIDAR or lidar)
system was used to obtain spatially and temporally resolved images
of particulate plumes. Lidar operates on the same principle as does
radar, only with a laser beam swept through the atmosphere rather
than a radio wave. In this test, the lidar was operated in an urban
area and the sweep was confined to distances fairly close to ground
level to monitor vehicle-related plumes. The range was about 10 km.
Point-sampled measurements of particulate matter and CO
concentrations were also made such that comparisons between lidar
data and local pollutant concentrations could be made. The
objective was to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of
lidar technology for use as an air quality monitoring tool.
The scope of this paper includes a description of the
instruments deployed along with an overview of their operating
principles, followed by comparisons between the lidar signal and
time-resolved CO and time-averaged particulate matter
concentrations. The impact of changes in traffic flow conditions,
weather, and particle-size distributions is also discussed.
Preliminary results show that the lidar signal is somewhat
dependent on particle-size distributions as well as the total mass
concentration; hence, both changes in wind conditions and traffic
conditions can affect the lidar signal. Correlations with the
upwind traffic and CO concentrations were obtained, although the
latter decreases with increasing wind speed. The overall lidar- CO
correlation based on a small data sample is 0.78. We expect the
correlation to get weaker when more data are analyzed.
Authors
- Sumantra Chakravarty - University of Minnesota
- David L. Hofeldt - University of Minnesota
- Phil Dieck - University of Minnesota
- Bernard Olson - University of Minnesota
- Kenneth Rubow - University of Minnesota
- Virgil Marple - University of Minnesota
- William Eichenger - Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Howard Kraye - Sante Fe Technologies, Inc.
- Michael Manore - Minnesota Department of Transportation