Aerosol Properties in Central Kalimantan Due to Peatland Fire

ABSTRACT

The optical properties of aerosol could describe the potential source of prevalent pollutants of certain area. With the annual occurrences of biomass burning over the peat swamp forest, the study of aerosol characters in Central Kalimantan province becomes important. Aerosols from Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) data network combine with some environmental parameters, i.e., rainfall, visibility, surface humidity and hotspot number are investigated. Here we use the data from 2012 to 2014 collected from AERONET in Palangkaraya. We found a strong relationship between aerosol properties and environmental parameters (rainfall, hotspot number, visibility). Variability of aerosol properties such as aerosol optical depth (AOD), Angstrom exponent number, and its fine mode are consistent with the dry period between August and October when most fire episodes occur. In fact, the increase of aerosol loading occurs mostly when the monthly rainfall reaches below 150 mm month^–1 (dry period), as the cut off number of our analyses. Considerable reduction of visibility below 500 m occurs whenever AOD is above 3.0. During observation period, we found that aerosol sources at this location originate from dust, marine aerosol, continental and urban aerosol, and biomass burning. The biomass burning aerosol gave a substantially high AOD values that reach almost 6.0 and fine feature as an indication of highly concentrated smoke from peatland source. Moreover, smouldering combustion from peat land is characterized by high value of single scattering albedo observed in the location.