Aerosol properties and air pollutants over an urban area

For a better understanding of urban aerosols, sun/sky photometry has been undertaken at the Kinki University campus in Higashi-Osaka as a NASA/AERONET station since 2002. A new instrument, the SPM-613D (Kimoto Electric), has been taking measurements at the same site since March 15, 2004. The relationship between aerosol properties obtained from radiometry with AERONET and the SPM measurements is examined. It is found that there is a linear correlation between SPM concentrations and aerosol properties, which indicates that aerosol characteristics can be estimated from SPM data, and vice versa.It is also shown that the air quality of the Higashi-Osaka site is poor due to not only the anthropogenic particles by local emissions, such as diesel vehicles and chemical industries, but also due to the dust particles coming from continental desert areas by large scale climatic conditions.