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Article history:
Received 2 April 2015
Received in revised form 3 August 2015
Accepted 12 August 2015
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
CALIPSO lidar measurements
Mexico City aerosol
Regional scale pollution outow
a b s t r a c t
We present the evidence of regional scale outow of particulate pollution from Mexico City using measurements
from the space borne CALIPSO lidar. The vertically resolved results are presented for winter months when the
large scale biomass burning from nearby areas is minimized, and the aerosol loading is dominated by anthropogenic outow from the city. The particulate depolarization ratio in the outowing plume has high values and reects the inuence of mixing of the urban pollution with the ubiquitous dust around the city. This is consistent
with the results from previous eld campaigns in the city and leads to polluted dust being the dominant aerosol
subtype as identied by the CALIPSO algorithm. A rst order estimate of the mass ux on two episodes using the
aerosol extinction proles from CALIPSO indicates outow of several hundred tons per day.
2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
It is estimated that globally about 54% of world population lived in
urban conglomerations in 2014 which is projected to rise to 66% by
2050 (UN, 2014). The large number of megacities in the developing
world attests to this. Air quality in these megacities has come under
close scrutiny in recent years. In particular, surface ozone and aerosol
concentration levels have been observed to be very high in some of
these megacities which are both detrimental to human health. In fact,
megacities can inuence regional air quality by exporting various species
of gases and particulate matter and a pollution potential index has been
developed to gauge this inuence on the basis of three-dimensional
transport model simulations (Lawrence, Butler, Steinkamp, Gurjar, &
Lelieveld, 2007). There are important differences between export of gaseous species and aerosols as the latter undergo deposition processes and
are preferentially transported horizontally because of scavenging processes occurring during convective lofting (Kunkel, Tost, & Lawrence,
2013). Lagrangian simulations also indicate latitude to be the most important factor for the regional scale transport effects (Cassiani, Stohl, &
Eckhardt, 2013).
One of the largest megacities in the world is the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA, 19.43N, 99.13W), which has some 20 million inhabitants and is the dominant source of anthropogenic pollution in the
region (Molina, Kolb, de Foy, Lamb, et al., 2007). The unique topography
of the area, with mountains on three sides of the city (~2200 m above
Corresponding author at: Science Systems and Applications Inc. (SSAI), NASA LaRC,
Hampton, VA 23681, USA.
E-mail address: jayanta.kar@nasa.gov (J. Kar).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2015.08.009
0034-4257/ 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
mean sea level), traps the pollution in the city during the early morning
hours and vents it in the afternoon through thermally driven processes
(de Foy, Burton, Ferrare, Hostetler, et al., 2006, 2011; de Foy, Varela,
Molina, & Molina, 2006; de Foy, Krotkov, Bei, Herndon, et al., 2009;
Molina et al., 2007; Molina, Madronich, Gaffney, Apel, et al., 2010). Additionally, MCMA is subject to emissions from the Popocatepatl volcano,
located south east of the city (de Foy et al., 2009; Raga, Kok,
Baumgardner, Baez, & Rosasa, 1999). As such the emissions and evolution of various constituents affecting the air quality in MCMA have
been the focus of several eld missions in the past two decades with coordinated airborne and ground measurements (Molina et al., 2007,
2010). In particular, the evolution of the gaseous and aerosol species
downwind from MCMA was studied extensively by the MIRAGE-Mex
and MILAGRO/INTEX-B eld missions (Molina et al., 2010). It has been
realized that MCMA potentially affects the air quality and tropospheric
chemistry in the region.
From the various eld missions and extensive ground based observations, the aerosol environment in MCMA has been determined to be
a complex mixture of dust, inorganic and organic matter with some
50% being secondary organic aerosols (de Foy et al., 2011). While
these special campaigns have contributed signicantly to our understanding of aerosol transport processes in MCMA, they are necessarily
limited in their scope, both spatially and temporally. A fuller and complementary perspective can be obtained from space borne instruments.
However the aerosols from MCMA and their evolution or export over
regional scales have not been studied extensively using satellite data
as of now. As part of the MILAGRO/INTEX-B campaign, aerosol optical
depth (AOD) retrieved from MODIS and OMI were used to compare
with the airborne measurements of the urban plume (Livingston,
Redemann, Russell, Torres, et al., 2009; Redemann, Zhang, Livingston,
206
2. Data
We use the global aerosol products retrieved from measurements of
the Cloud Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument aboard the CALIPSO satellite since 2006 (Winker, Hunt, & McGill,
2007; Winker et al., 2010). The primary level 1 measurements are the
attenuated backscatter proles, polarized parallel and perpendicular
to the transmitted laser pulses at 532 nm and the total attenuated backscatter proles (i.e., parallel and perpendicular components combined)
at 1064 nm. In this study we use the level 2 5-km resolution layer products and prole products from versions 3.01 (June 13, 2006 to October
31, 2011) and 3.02 (November 1, 2011 to February 28, 2013) of the
CALIPSO data (Vaughan, Pitts, Trepte, Winker, et al., 2014). With respect
to earlier releases, this version provides signicant improvements in the
areas of aerosol layer detection, boundary layer cloud clearing and
cloud-aerosol discrimination. The CALIOP level 2 data, which are derived from the level 1 data using a number of complex algorithms
(Liu, Vaughan, Winker, Kittaka, et al., 2009; Omar, Winker, Kittaka,
Vaughan, et al., 2009; Vaughan, Powell, Kuehn, Young, et al., 2009;
Winker, Vaughan, Omar, Hu, et al., 2009; Young & Vaughan, 2009),
have been assessed in a number of papers. McGill, Vaughan, Trepte,
Hart, et al. (2007) evaluated the minimum detectable backscatter coefcient for the CALIPSO retrieval scheme, and found it to be in excellent
agreement with theoretical values predicted prior to launch. Rogers,
Vaughan, Hostetler, Burton, et al. (2014) conducted an in-depth study
evaluating all aspects of the CALIPSO aerosol layer products, and found
that while the CALIPSO layer detection scheme works well during
nighttime measurements, its daytime performance is (as expected)
somewhat degraded by the lower signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) that
typify daytime measurements (Hunt et al., 2009). Accurate backscatter and extinction retrievals of aerosols within these layers in
the CALIPSO algorithm depends upon the selection of the aerosol
layers as one of six subtypes which is done using their optical properties and surface characteristics (Omar et al., 2009). The CALIPSO aerosol
subtypes have been compared with corresponding aerosol types derived from AERONET data (Mielonen, Arola, Komppula, Kukkonen,
et al., 2009; Misra, Tripathi, Kaul, & Welton, 2013) and from high
spectral resolution lidar (HSRL) measurements (Burton et al.,
2013) with overall good agreement but with some deviations for
smoke and polluted dust.
3. Results
3.1. Examples of pollution outow in CALIPSO measurements
Fig. 1 shows two examples of CALIPSO browse images of attenuated
total backscatter measurements at 532 nm in the vicinity of MCMA on
December 25, 2008 and December 4, 2012 respectively, with arrows
marking the position closest to MCMA. The CALIPSO orbit tracks are
also shown, with the closest distance between MCMA and the
CALIPSO transect being ~ 100 km in both examples. The large highaltitude plumes of high backscatter can be clearly seen extending over
large distances from MCMA (extended yellow-orange features).
On December 25, 2008, the plume extends mostly northward with a
thinner plume extending to south. On the other hand for December 4,
2012, most of the plume seems to be extending to the south of the
city. Because other strong sources of particulate matter are absent at
this time of the year, these are likely to be signatures of anthropogenic
pollution outow from the city itself, possibly with some contribution
from the Popocatpetl volcano. As can be seen, distinct outow plumes
reach altitudes of up to ~5 km, and are lofted several kilometers above
the mountainous terrain. Pollution from MCMA area gets vented by
thermally induced winds and convection acting like an air-pump
and then advected away by synoptic winds (de Foy et al., 2006, 2011).
In the CALIPSO algorithm scene classication algorithms, optical properties such as volume depolarization ratio and attenuated backscatter
color ratio are used in conjunction with spatial information to distinguish aerosol layers from clouds (Liu et al., 2009). The vertical feature
masks in the bottom panels of Fig. 1 indicate that in each case the
outowing plumes are aerosol layers with a few cloud layers embedded
in them. These strong aerosol plumes are clearly detected in the
CALIPSO data in the winter months of every year on transects passing
in the vicinity of MCMA, which implies that this is a robust, persistent
phenomenon and not an artifact of the measurements as such. In principle, if these plumes represent pollution outow from the MCMA region, they should be observable during other seasons as well.
However, overlying clouds during summer and biomass burning emissions during spring transported from the Yucatan province may not
allow for unambiguous identication of these plumes.
Figs. 2 and 3 show the back trajectories for air parcels initiated along
the CALIPSO transects on the two event days that can be traced back to
within 20 km of MCMA within about 2460 h. These trajectories were
driven by GEOS5 winds (Reinecker, Suarez, Todling, Bacmeister, et al.,
2008) and calculated using the NASA Langley Trajectory Model
(LaTM) (Fairlie, Szykman, Gilliland, Pierce, et al., 2009; Pierce & Fairlie,
1993). The trajectories are color coded according to their initial altitudes
which are given in the legend in the inset of the gures. For the event on
Dec. 25, 2008, a signicant part of the high altitude aerosol plume can be
traced to the vicinity of MCMA. The air parcels spent a long time near
the city which would allow the pollution to be picked up. For the
event on Dec. 4, 2012, a stronger north-easterly ow prevailed and a
smaller part of the high altitude aerosol plume can be directly related
to locations within 20 km of the city.
3.2. Optical properties of the outow
Retrieved optical properties of the outow are shown in Fig. 4a with
height-latitude cross sections of particulate depolarization ratio at
532 nm, an indicator of particle shape. We have used all data within a
coincidence strip between 98 W and 100 W for the winter months (November through February) between 2007 and 2012 for this plot. The
data was limited to nighttime transects only as the signal-to-noise ratios
are signicantly worse during the daytime because of the solar background illumination. For this plot, we have calculated the particulate depolarization ratio as [p / (T p)], where p is the perpendicular
backscatter coefcient and T is the total backscatter coefcient as available in the CALIPSO prole products. We also calculate the uncertainty
207
Fig. 1. Examples of aerosol outow from Mexico City area in CALIPSO lidar data on two different days. The top panels show the 532 nm total attenuated backscatter measured by the lidar
and the bottom panels show the vertical feature masks. The corresponding CALIPSO transects are shown in the insets in the top panels.
in the particulate depolarization ratio by propagating the uncertainties using the above equation. To ensure reliable retrievals, the
data were ltered using the extinction quality control (ext_qc) parameter reported in the CALIPSO level 2 data products. Only those
data for which the initial estimate of lidar ratio generated a stable extinction solution (ext_qc = 0) or for which lidar ratio estimates
could be made directly from the data (ext_qc = 1) or where the
aerosol layer is opaque (ext_qc = 16) were used (Young &
Vaughan, 2009). This ltering criterion removes about 2% of the
proles within the coincidence box. Data points where the extinction uncertainty calculation diverged (indicated by a value of 99.99
for the estimated uncertainty) were also rejected. Further, only the
depolarization data with a threshold on the estimated relative uncertainty (500%) was used. This threshold was used to include data
with lower depolarization ratios with relatively higher uncertainty,
which would otherwise be preferentially removed. After application
of all the lters, approximately 95% of the proles remain. The lidar
data were binned in 0.25 in latitude.
Fig. 2. Back trajectory paths for parcels that can be traced to within 20 km of Mexico City and were subsequently sampled by CALIPSO on December 25, 2008. The initial altitudes
corresponding to the colored trajectories are given in the legend. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
This plot was generated using Google Earth imagery (data LDEO-Columbia, NSF, NOAA, image Landsat, data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, and GEBCO).
208
Fig. 3. Back trajectory paths for parcels that can be traced to within 20 km of Mexico City and were subsequently sampled by CALIPSO on December 4, 2012. The initial altitudes corresponding to the colored trajectories are given in the legend. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
This plot was generated using Google Earth imagery (data LDEO-Columbia, NSF, NOAA, image Landsat, data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, and GEBCO).
209
Fig. 6. Height latitude cross section of particulate color ratio in MCMA outow.
Fig. 8. Height latitude cross section of 532 nm extinction coefcient (km1) near MCMA.
210
Fig. 9. Relative abundance of the various aerosol subtypes in the vicinity of MCMA.
amounts can be of the order of several hundred tons per day. This satellite perspective conrms the strong regional scale impact of the pollution outows from MCMA. This study indicates the potential of using
CALIPSO lidar data for monitoring the regional air quality around large
urban centers like MCMA and the impact of long range pollution
outows.
Acknowledgments
The CALIPSO data used in this work were obtained from the NASA
Langley Atmospheric Sciences Data Center. J.K. acknowledges useful discussions with B. de Foy. We thank Kurt Severance for the help with the
CALIPSO curtain plots.
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