Abstract

Due to its rapidly economic development, China is currently facing severe air pollution in a large scale, resulting in increasingly serious influence. It has the characteristics of regional scale and complex components with high concentration level, especially in the eastern China. For the discussion of such environmental strategies and regional efforts, it is necessary to investigate temporal and spatial distribution of pollutants, emissions and pollution transport for better understanding of the impact of various sources on air quality. Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS), as a spectroscopic remote sensing technique, is of great advantage for the measurement of atmospheric pollutants, such as in real-time, automatization, reliable running. Recently, DOAS techniques have been developed to map the distribution of regional pollutants (gases and aerosols) with various platforms (e.g. network, mobile and airborne DOAS).

An overview of MAX-DOAS (Multi-Axes DOAS), mobile DOAS and airborne DOAS is presented. MAX-DOAS can derive information on the vertical profile of the observed trace gases, as well as aerosols, by performing measurements at several elevation angles (from the horizon to the zenith). We established a MAX-DOAS network in the eastern China. Mobile DOAS can rapidly detect spatial and temporal distributions and emissions of air pollutants via mounting the Zenith or MAX- DOAS systems on mobile platform. Airborne imaging DOAS can provide pollutant mapping in a large scale. The principle, instrumentation and inversion algorithm are given. As typical applications of these techniques, measurements of investigating regional pollution in Guangzhou, Nanjing and North China Plain are discussed in the aspects of characteristics of temporal and spatial distribution, pollution transport pathway, emission sources and amounts. The prospect of DOAS in regional air pollution monitoring is further discussed for estimation of total emission and comparison with emission inventory.

© 2014 Optical Society of America