Active-passive Optical Remote Sensing for Weather and Climate Research

Studying optical properties of atmospheric aerosol is important because aerosol affects people around the world significantly. Aerosol can directly affect climate change by scattering and absorption of solar and other radiations, and also indirectly affect the radiation by affecting cloud formation. Tropospheric aerosol is associated with air pollution and adverse health effects. These effects strongly depend on the physical and optical properties of aerosol particles. In this paper, we present the method combined sunphotometer (passive measurement) and Lidar developed by Wuhan University (active remote sensing measurement) to retrieve the aerosol optical depth. The primary results show that the proposed method improved the precision of aerosol optical depth effectively. Furthermore, long-term atmospheric and aerosol data could be obtained by consecutive Lidar and sunphotometer observations. Also these data will be useful for future understanding about their environmental and climate effects.