Aerosols Observations with a new lidar station in Punta Arenas, Chile

Abstract

A tropospheric lidar system was installed in Punta Arenas, Chile (53.13°S, 70.88°W) in September 2016 under the collaboration project SAVERNET (Chile, Japan and Argentina) to monitor the atmosphere. Statistical analyses of the clouds and aerosols behavior and some cases of dust detected with lidar, at these high southern latitude and cold environment regions during three months (austral spring) are discussed using information from satellite, modelling and solar radiation ground measurements.

Vertical aerosol distribution in the southern hemispheric midlatitudes as observed with lidar in Punta Arenas, Chile (53.2° S and 70.9° W), during ALPACA

“…These pristine conditions already motivated the groundbased Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE1) in the 1990s (Bates et al, 1998) and were confirmed by Minikin et al (2003), who contrasted upper-tropospheric in situ aerosol aircraft observations in the northern midlatitudes (Scotland) and southern midlatitudes (Punta Arenas). However, only a few studies of ground-based aerosol and cloud layer profiling were performed in the southern midlatitudes in the following decades (Lopes et al, 2013;Gouveia et al, 2017), although such measurements would have served as good opportunity to contrast the aerosol radiative effect in the northern and southern midlatitudes, with respect to the aerosol sources, as well as the influence of aerosols on cloud microphysics (Kanitz et al, 2011(Kanitz et al, , 2013.…”