Study of aerosol pollution of the atmosphere over an industrial region using lidars

International audienceWe discuss here the methodology of using lidar stations for ecological monitoring of air over an industrial center. The city of Soligorsk, Belorussia, has been taken as an example. The lidars were used to identify the sources of dust emissions, to map the dust mass concentration, and to estimate the rate of dust sedimentation. The lidar data obtained, enabled us to estimate the rates of dust emissions coming from industrial enterprises, as a whole, and from their individual technological installations. Contributions from such distributed pollution sources as dumps, construction sites and others are evaluated. The entire bulk of thus compiled information has been used to construct a mathematical model of the aerosol pollution transport in the region under study. The input parameters to this model are the rates of dust emissions measured and meteorological quantities. Calculated values of the aerosol concentration in the near-ground layer and the rate of aerosol sedimentation have been compared with the data of observations. The model is available as a computer codes and may be used for numerically predicting the level of atmospheric pollution. The forecast may be produced with the account for different meteorological situations and varying intensity of the production process