China's 13th Arctic Ocean Scientific Expedition Conducts Aerosol Lidar Observations

China's 13th Arctic Ocean Scientific Expedition aboard the icebreaker Xuelong 2 is operating in the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean. In the course of the expedition, a variety of new means are being used to study the polar atmosphere.


Le Fange, member of the 13th Chinese Arctic Ocean Scientific Expedition: This instrument is called Aerosol Scattering Lidar (ASLR), which mainly observes the vertical distribution of aerosol concentration from the near-surface layer up to 10,000 meters in the air, as well as some related physical parameters. This is a real-time generated data map, preliminary speculation, this may be mainly due to the ocean emission of a large number of primary sea salt aerosols caused by the PM10 aerosol concentration increase.

The so-called aerosols can be simply understood as solid or liquid particulate matter suspended in the air, for example, haze in the city, soot emitted from industrial boilers and engines, and smoke from forest wildfires or straw burning all contain large amounts of aerosols.
It is understood that China had conducted a LiDAR observation test of the aerosol situation in the Arctic Ocean in 2016. With the continuous optimization of radar performance, this year's Arctic Ocean scientific research began to fully utilize LiDAR to collect data.

Le Fange, member of China's 13th Arctic Ocean Scientific Expedition: The Arctic Ocean is currently a popular area for marine aerosol research, due to the special local hydrological environment, including changes in sea ice coverage and density, changes in the local endemic plankton species and their abundance, etc., these factors may significantly affect the generation and emission of aerosols, but the mechanism and process of their influence are still not clear. These factors may significantly affect aerosol production and emission, but the mechanism and process of their influence are not well understood. This is an important reason for us to conduct aerosol observations in the Arctic Ocean.