Aerosol optical thickness research page

Aerosol optical thickness measurement page

This page is to show project results for a graduate class in atmospheric measurements at the University of Nevada, Reno. The measurements were planned for a short period of time (weeks) during the Spring 1998 semester. My objective was to quickly build a scientific instrument based on a extremely limited budget. The sun photometer instrument was based on the plans from the Haze-SPAN web pages. The data was taken manually at first and later used a data acquisition system. An Eppley sun tracker was later provided by Dr. John Hallett and used on the Desert Research Institute building roof in Stead, Nevada.

Asian dust episode

17 March 1998: The sun photometer (TERC VHS-1) was built and ready to take data.

20 April 1998: A modified and rugged sun photometer was built (detection at ~525 nm) and attached to Eppley solar tracker (photo)

I happened to be monitoring aerosol optical thickness during two episodes of elevated aerosol. The first episode was due to long range transport of wildland fire smoke from the Pacific Northwest. The second episode was from an unusual source for this area. Very long range transport brought fine dust from Asia. Several other people from around the west have also measured these aerosols. I have included some plots below showing how aerosol optical thickness as well as PM10 varied during the period April 15 through May 5, 1998.

Plot of AOT measured from 17 April to 29 April 1998

Photos of sunsets on 27 April and 28 April, 1998 in Reno

PM10 beta attenuation monitor in Sparks, NV during 5 April to 10 May, 1998

Time series of PM10 TEOM network in California during 15 April to 5 May, 1998

Animated GIF of PM10 TEOM network during 15 April to 5 May, 1998 (roughly 1Mb file)

Reconstructed fine aerosol mass from IMPROVE network during dust episode (coming soon)

PKzipped Microsoft Excel 97 table of AOT data (120kb)

Paper written for class in PDF format (851 kB)