Site Specific Aerosol Optical Thickness Characteristics over Mysore

As a part of Indian Space Research Organization’s RESPOND programme, a study has been carried out on clear sky days of the winter months December 2005 and January 2006. Spectral Aerosol Optical Thicknesses (AOT) were measured with a MICROTOPS II sun photometer at four sites of specific topography: a hill top, busy downtown, a calm water bed, and university campus with greenery. These sites are situated within the urban agglomeration of Mysore, a low latitude (12.3°N) continental location. Daytime decreasing trend in AOT was observed. Forenoon-afternoon asymmetry was exhibited at all the sites. These features were also found to be site-specific in nature. The present work focuses on the characteristics of atmospheric aerosols at different sites located in and around Mysore City. The future interest is to cover some more sites around Mysore City having varied aerosol characteristics.


INTRODUCTION
Earth's atmosphere is an envelope of gases surrounding the globe.Many natural phenomena, such as meteors, volcanic eruptions, sand storms, ocean spray, forest fires, and the green world, inject the atmosphere with particulate matter.
Contributing on a lesser scale are anthropogenic activities, such as industry, use of internal combustion engines, construction activities, etc. Particulate matter, either insolid or liquid form, depending on the size, remain suspended in the air occupying less than one percent by volume.Such particles constitute the world of aerosols (d'Almeida et al., 1991).
Being an important minor constituent in the atmosphere, aerosols play an important role in Earth's climate system and the global biogeochemical cycle (Duce, 1995;Sokolik and Toon, 1996).They interact with solar and terrestrial radiation and influence the energy balance of the Earth-atmosphere climate system.
The effects of aerosols in the atmosphere remain largely uncertain due to the poor understanding of aerosol properties and their spatial and temporal variations (IPCC, 2001).Dependent upon their chemical composition, aerosols interact with incoming radiation, and hence, affect the atmospheric radiation budget.In recent years, it has been realized that aerosols have a potential to induce changes in climate not only due to major volcanic eruptions, such as the El Chichón and Mt.Pinatubo, but also due to the impact of ever-increasing anthropogenic activities.For example, subsequent to major volcanic eruptions like El Chichón (Hoffman, 1987: Hoffman,1988) and Mt.Pinatubo (Dutton and Christy, 1992;Labitzke and McCormick, 1992) transmission of direct solar radiation to the lower atmosphere and the earth's surface could be reduced by as much as 15%, with a rather slow recovery time on the order of a year or more (Torres et al., 1995).This can cause a global cooling of 0.5 to 1 K (Ackermann, 1988), while there can be a warming at lower stratosphere levels by about 3 to 4 K (Labitzke et al., 1983).There are suggestions that major volcanic eruptions can induce climatic instabilities (Reiter, 1988).
Aerosols also play a significant role in chemistry and ionization phenomenon in the middle atmosphere.They provide the surfaces for heterogeneous chemistry (between gas and liquid, or gas and solid) which in recent years has been found to be the dominant process responsible not only for the Antarctic and Arctic ozone holes, but also for the global ozone depletion (Hoffmann and Solomon, 1989).Aerosols act as the condensation nuclei in the formation of fog, mist and clouds.These Aerosols exist over a wide range of scale sizes, extending from 10 -4 μ (1 μ = 10 -4 cm) to about 100 μ.Depending upon their sizes, they are classified by Junge (1963): Aitken nuclei (10 -4 μ to about 10 -1 μ), large particles (10 -1 μ to about 1 μ) and giant particles (1 μ to about 100 μ).These size ranges are also termed respectively as nucleation, accumulation and coarse mode (Whitby, 1978).
Aerosols of different sizes take part in different atmospheric phenomena.For atmospheric radiation budget and climate studies, the aerosols of interest-the so called optically active aerosols-are in the size range 0.05 μ ≤ r ≤ 5 μ.In a clear atmosphere without clouds, aerosols govern absorption, scattering and reflection of solar radiation (Preining, 1991).Atmospheric extinction for any given site depends strongly on the location of that site and the nature of its surroundings (Robert et al., 1973).It has been further established that atmospheric aerosols exhibit characteristics dependent on spatial features, such as altitude, water bodies, vegetation (McCartney, 1976;Iqbal, 1983).This paper presents the study of aerosols at a low latitude, where a portable sun photometer was used to carry out experimental observations.Data were (1) In this equation, r 0 and r are the sun-earth distances, mean and the actual, respectively; m is the relative air mass which in terms of solar zenith angle χ becomes m = sec χ; and the last term T λ is the integrated columnar extinction, also referred to as total optical depth/thickness.
The flux F λ is being generally measured with a sun photometer, the output is an electrical signal of voltage V, volts proportional to the flux.Replacing F by V and on logarithmic scale, the Eq. ( 1) is linearized as: The graphical representation of this equation is referred to as Langley plot.Zero air mass intercept determined from the intercept, serves as a calibration constant.The total optical depth T λ is given by the slope.By subtracting the contributions due to Rayleigh scattering and molecular absorptions from T λ aerosol optical thickness (AOT) τ λ is determined.
All these calculations are done instantly by the built-in algorithm in the MICROTOPS II.In order to obtain instantaneous value of AOT, the calibration constant is pre-determined and linearized with the signal voltage at any instant.

LOCATION FEATURES
Mysore (12° 19 ′ N and 76° 39 ′ E) situated at an altitude of 767 m above sea level on the Deccan Plateau of Peninsular India is a low-latitude station.On the east, west and south, about 300-500 km away, are the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, respectively.To the north lies the Asiatic continent.Geographic climate is moderate.In any year, the period June to November receives monsoon rains, which account for 73% of the average annual rainfall of 760 mm.Following the rainy season, winter prevails December through February.During this season the temperature is low and the rainfall is about 3%.
The hot summer months of March through May account for 24% of the year's rainfall.An overall range of temperature of the year lies between 18-36℃.
To study site-specific features of aerosol within the district of Mysore, four sites were selected, each with specific topography: Site 1: Sri Chamundi Hills (CHH) Situated southeast of Mysore.
The height of the Hill is about 300 m from ground level.From the graphs, one can observe that starting from a high value in the early hours, AOT decreases continuously as the day advances in all the cases.During forenoon (FN), the decrease is rather high, whereas it is not so large in the afternoon (AN)..This type of variation can be seen distinctly at sites other than CHH where the FN values are slightly higher than those of AN.Shaw (1976) attributes the morning high values to the anthropogenic activities: "AOT would increase in the morning hours as urban pollutants are emitted under a capping radiative inversion.By noon or shortly after, the radiative inversion normally starts to break up under the action of solar heating, thereby allowing the early morning trapped pollutants to be ventilated out of the city by convection."Furthermore, the increasing temperature gives rise to larger water content in the atmosphere.

AOT characteristics
The coalescing process results in aerosols of appropriate size for the scattering of solar radiation.While these processes increase AOT in the FN, reduced anthropogenic activity, together with less water vapor content due to lowering of temperature, are the causes for smaller AOT in AN.The values are given in the Table 1.Average AOT versus wavelength plots are shown in Figs.
7 and 8.It may be noticed that the AOTs of the sites differ largely at shorter wavelengths and the difference becomes smaller as the wavelength increases.This is in accordance with the power law operating between the parameters, AOT and the wavelength.The high values of AOT at KRC, which were the highest of all the sites under study, can be attributed to large-scale anthropogenic activity with high vehicular traffic.A cleaner atmosphere at higher altitude is responsible for the AOT being least for CHH.For all the wavelengths, the AOT is higher during FN than in the AN.A clear demonstration of this     Rasmussen and Went, 1965;Went, 1955).Also

Forenoon (FN)-Afternoon (AN) asymmetry
Large difference between the AOT values of FN and AN is said to be the asymmetry of AOT.
The extent of asymmetry varies with the site, as well as with the wavelength, as is evident from the graphs.For a quantitative study, a symmetry factor η λ is defined through the expression where τ FN and τ AN are the average AOT for FN and AN, respectively, at wavelength λ.The asymmetry in AOT for FN and AN observed at different locations in and around Mysore can be accounted for in terms of water vapor content in the atmosphere.Due to low temperature in the morning hours, water vapor is in the condensed form, while a part of it will be condensed on aerosols, also.Particle growth due to water-vapor condensation results in increased solar extinction.On the other hand, due to the increase in temperature during AN, evaporation takes place, and thereby water droplets will decrease in concentration and size, resulting in reduced extinction.
Table 2 gives the asymmetry factors for the studied sites.The campus has the highest asymmetry factor followed by Hill and Lake.The least asymmetry factor corresponds to KRC.At longer wavelengths, asymmetry tends to be more when compared to shorter wavelengths.At the longer wavelengths of 936 nm and 1020 nm, the asymmetry factors do not exhibit much difference.This indicates the prevalence of aerosols of a discrete size spectrum (Krishna Moorthy et al., 1999).The difference exhibited at shorter wavelengths can be attributed to anthropogenic activities and to the plant kingdom.

CONCLUSION
It has been observed that AOT values decrease continuously starting from a high value as the day advances.This scenario was found to be exhibited at all the observation sites.During FN, the decrease was rather high compared to AN except for the location, CHH.Because of the capping action of aerosols generated during the previous night, the FN AOT did not show a rapid decrease at CHH.Of all the sites under study, highest AOT was observed at KRC because of large-scale anthropogenic activities and high vehicular traffic.Asymmetry in the FN and AN values of AOT was observed at locations selected for the study.The observed asymmetry was also found to vary with wavelength.
acknowledges the award of the fellowship.My special thanks to the Management of PESIT and my colleagues in the department for their constant encouragement.
clouds form an important component of the Earthatmosphere climate system.Hence, the study of aerosols constitutes an important component of atmospheric science research.Tropospheric aerosols are short-lived due to gravitational settling and rain washout, and produce only local and seasonal effects.They are largely dominated by mineral dust, soot and water droplets (McCartney, 1976).
collected at different sites, each having specific topographic features.Analysis of the data produced site-specific aerosol characteristics.Similar type of work was carried out by Suresh & Elgar (2005) for the coastal site Dona Paula on the west coast of India.THEORY Solar radiation traversing through the terrestrial atmosphere undergoes extinction due to three processes.Rayleigh scattering by air molecules, Mie scattering by aerosols, and molecular absorption.Solar radiation is a composite of monochromatic radiations, each of wavelength λ.Spectral flux F λ reaching the ground is related to the extra-terrestrial solar flux F 0λ through the Bouguer-Lambert-Beer law.
photometer MICROTOPS II developed by Solar Light Company, USA (2002) was used.The instrument is equipped with five accurately aligned optical collimators, with a full field view of 2.5°.Internal baffles are integrated into the device to eliminate internal reflections.Each channel is fitted with a narrow-band interference filter and a photodiode suitable for the particular wavelength range.The MICROTOPS II used in this study has optical filters transmitting the radiation centered at wavelengths of 440, 500, 675, 936 and 1020 nm.The collimators are encapsulated in a cast aluminum optical block for stability.A sun target and a pointing assembly are permanently attached to the optical block and laser-aligned to ensure accurate alignment with the optical channels.When the sun's image is centered in the bull's-eye of the sun target, all optical channels are oriented directly at the solar disk.

Figs. 1
Figs. 1-4 show the diurnal variation of average AOT for the winter months December 2005 and January 2006 at five wavelengths.

Figs. 1
Figs. 1-4 clearly show that during daylight hours, the AOTs at KRC are the highest, and at CHH, the lowest.For a quantitative description, the AOTs are averaged for FN and AN separately.

Table 1 .
Average values of AOT for FN & AN.