Observation of Dust and Smoke Plume Transport and Impact on Remote Sensing of Air Quality in New York City

Abstract:

Long-range transport of aloft aerosol plumes affects both air quality and climate on regional and continental scales. Asian dust impacts on the western US and Canada have been extensively analyzed, yet such quantitative demonstrations are not well documented in the northeastern US. Similarly, episodes of continental transport of smoke plumes from forest fires in western US and Canada impact visibility and air quality in the US east coast. In this study, we present the synergistic observation of transported dust and smoke aerosol plumes in New York City (NYC, 40.821ºN, 73.949ºW), using a combination of a ground-based multiple-wavelength lidar, a CIMEL sunphotometer/radiometer, satellite sensors such as CALIOP and MODIS/VIIRS, and NAAPS aerosol forecast model. We show case studies of trans-Pacific Asian dust transport to the northeast US driven by the strong western or polar jets. The potential impact of the plumes on the local air quality is indicated by the plumes mixing down into boundary layer and the coincident increase of the ground PM measurement. Using multi-year lidar and sunphotometer observations, range-resolved monthly occurrence frequency of aloft aerosol plumes and modification of local aerosol optical properties are presented. The transport paths and the optical properties of aerosol for each clustered path are characterized. We further demonstrate the impact of these aloft plumes on the surface PM_2.5 estimates from MODIS and VIIRS derived aerosol optical depth (AOD), and observe that when the aloft plumes-layer AODs are filtered out using lidar, the correlation between AOD-PM_2.5 is much improved.