Remote quantification of plume aerosol concentrations over agricultural and forest canopies

This paper presents a methodology for quantifying the mass aloft in boundary layer aerosol plumes from elastic backscatter lidar measurements. Independent measurements of the source strength and particle size distributions are used together with lidar backscatter to calculate the dynamics and spatial distributions of the mass concentrations of material aloft in the plume. Examples are presented from three types of plumes: a stable boundary layer smoke plume above a forest canopy, a stable boundary layer aerial spray plume for vector control, and a convective boundary layer dust plume generated from agricultural field operations.