O’Neill, Norm
Université de Sherbrooke
($246,000 over 3 years, awarded 2001, completed February 2007)
To understand the air quality impact of aerosols in the short term and their climate-change impact in the long term, we have to improve our knowledge of their optical effects. This project helped achieve that goal by measuring, characterizing and analyzing optical data on aerosol conditions in a transition zone between urban Toronto and rural southern Ontario. The region is influenced by a wide variety of aerosols, ranging from clean-air background aerosols, to pollution and smoke particles to large dust aerosols. Ground-based data were acquired simultaneously by LIDAR (a pulsed laser system) and passive optical measures (sunphotometry and sky radiometry). The combination of the two techniques provided a better understanding of aerosol (as well as cloud) dynamics in the region of an experimental site (Egbert, Ontario). This was important for validating and predicting aerosol behaviour in air-quality and climate-change models. The accumulated data set also facilitated the validation of satellite-based aerosol remote-sensing missions, in particular the tandem of CALIPSO (LIDAR) and MODIS (passive radiometer).