Pulsed differential optical absorption spectroscopy applied to air pollution measurement in urban troposphere

Differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) is useful for various types of trace gas measurements in the lower troposphere. In this paper, we report the DOAS measurement conducted in Chiba, Japan during 2009 and 2010. An optical path length of 5.5 km is employed to measure the average concentration of NO2 using a xenon aviation obstruction light that flashes every 1.5 s. By virtue of the high stability of the light source intensity, the intensity measurement enables the retrieval of aerosol extinction coefficient averaged over the optical path. The results are compared with the concurrent results of ground sampling and sunphotometer measurements.