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Angström Turbidity In The Lower Layers Of The Troposphere

Article  in  Environmental engineering and management journal · January 2011

DOI: 10.30638/eemj.2011.019

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Environmental Engineering and Management Journal January 2011, Vol.10, No. 1, 133-138
http://omicron.ch.tuiasi.ro/EEMJ/

“Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi, Romania

______________________________________________________________________________________________

ÅNGSTRÖM TURBIDITY IN THE LOWER LAYERS

OF THE TROPOSPHERE

Sabina Stefan1∗, Laura Mihai1,3, Doina Nicolae2, Andreea Boscornea1

1
University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, P.O.BOX MG-11, Magurele, Bucharest, Romania
2
National Institute of Optoelectronics, INOE 2000, Atomistilor 409, Magurele, Romania
3
National Institute for Laser, Plasma and Radiation Physics, P.O.BOX MG-36, Magurele, Romania

Abstract

The Ångström turbidity (β) is the optical parameter which characterizes the air masses and consequently air quality. It can be
determined using AOD (Aerosol Optical Depth) for one wavelength and Ångström exponent. This paper is focused on testing
methods to assess the turbidity using remote sensing measurements from equipments as Lidar, Cimel sun-photometer and
Nephelometer. The AOD values were obtained from sun-photometer and computed from Lidar using extinction coefficient data.
For the Ångström exponent the three types values were used: (i) values from AERONET for #395 sun-photometer situated at
Magurele (INOE2000, 44°21′N; 26°1′E); (ii) values computed from nephelometer data also at Magurele (Faculty of Physics); (iii)
a constant value of 1.3 from scientific literature. In addition, the dependence of the turbidity on temperature and wind for
Magurele was tested. The expected results for turbidity were similar but not the same. The explanation consists in the differences
between methods used to obtain the AOD. The results show that, for Magurele, in summer the averaged Ångström turbidity has
the value 0.13 (at 500 nm), which are related to moderate turbidity.

Key words: Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), meteorology, turbidity parameter, wavelength parameter
Received: November, 2010; Revised final: January, 2011; Accepted: January, 2011

1. Introduction been used as measures of this property. They can be

Spectral AOD is an important quantity in
atmospheric aerosols studies and in determining their
optical indices. In the visible range (0.4 – 0.75 µm),
where the optical absorption in gases is minimum, in
cloudless conditions, the aerosols represent the main
atmospheric component which influences the
radiative budget. Its influence on the radiation passing
through the atmosphere is important especially, in
urban or industrialized areas, due to loading of
atmosphere with anthropogenic aerosols. Turbidity is
a measure of atmospheric aerosol loading and
consequently an important factor in air quality studies
and climate modeling.
Along the development of the atmospheric
science, various indices have been used to monitor
the turbidity conditions of the atmosphere (Ångström,
1929; Schuepp, 1949). Among them the turbidity
parameters, α and β (Ångström, 1929), have long
determined through various methods, from broad-
band to selected narrow-band spectral filter radiation
measurements (Chaabane, 2008; Cachorro et al.,
2000, 2001; WMO, 1993).
The Ångström turbidity coefficient, β, linked
to the absorption and diffusion of aerosols, is
particularly important since many solar radiation
models for clear days use this parameter. There is a
high interest in atmospheric turbidity as it is related to
air pollution and climate studies and the development
of active and passive solar designs (Li et al., 2002).
The related studies showed that turbidity for a
specific site depends also on local emissivity
(industry and anthropogenic sources) and on air
masses moving above an aerosol transport.
The aim of this paper is to determine the
turbidity at Magurele, a suburban area near
Bucharest, Romania, using three independent remote
sensing equipments: sun-photometer, lidar and

∗
Author to whom all correspondence should be addressed: e-mail: sabina_stefan@yahoo.com; Phone:+40 722324600
 Stefan et al./Environmental Engineering and Management Journal 10 (2011), 1, 133-138
nephelometer. Each of them is able to measure the
scattering or extinction of solar radiation due to the
presence of aerosols in the atmosphere. Short
theoretical considerations on these processes are
presented in Section 2. In the same Section the data
and the methodology used are discussed.
The results are summarized in Section 3. The
effect of the origin of the air masses on the diurnal,
daily and monthly variation of the atmospheric
turbidity is investigated by examining the wind
direction and wind speed. The correlation of
meteorological parameters with the turbidity
coefficients is also analyzed and discussed in this
Section 3. The conclusions end the paper.
2. Theoretical considerations and methodology
2.1. Theoretical considerations
Generally, the experimental AOD is obtained
applying the Beer-Lambert law to irradiance data and
by removing the contribution due to Rayleigh
scattering and to the absorption of atmospheric gases
from the total atmospheric optical depth. From AOD
one can further obtain the α − β turbidity parameters.
In the Ångström formula (Ångström, 1929) (Eq. 1),
τ a (λ ) is the AOD at the wavelength λ (which is
expressed in micrometers), Ångström turbidity
coefficient, β is a dimensionless coefficient
embedding the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere,
and α is the wavelength’s exponent (the Ångström
exponent) which is a representative of the aerosol size
distribution.
τ a ( λ ) = βλ−α
(1)
The relation (1) is obviously an
approximation. However, due to its simple form, this
relation is frequently used in atmospheric optics. One
of the key elements of this approximation is that the
above two parameters ( α − β ) are ‘‘independent’’.
The α parameter characterizes the spectral features of
aerosols and it is mainly related to the size of the
particles (Cachorro et al., 2000; Shifrin, 1995), while
the β parameter is related to the particle concentration
and represents the AOD at 1 µm. The Ångström law
is appropriate for relatively narrow spectral ranges.
An expanded wavelength intervals departure from
linearity is expected for aerosols. Consequently, a
more complex representation of the aerosol particle
size distribution, far from Junge or monomodal log
normal distributions is necessary (O’Neill et al.,
2000).
The α parameter can be evaluated from
measurements made on cloudless days of spectral
direct normal irradiance at two wavelengths where
absorption is negligible. For such a couple of
wavelengths it can readily be obtained (Charlson, al.,
1996) (Eq. 2):
134
α ( λ1 ,λ2 ) = ln( τ ( λ1 ) / τ ( λ2 )) / ln( λ2 / λ1 ) (2)
The electromagnetic scattering theory
indicates that small particles with radius comparable
to λ have large α values of order 1, while large
particles have small α value close to 0. The
wavelength exponent (α) values range between 0.5
and 1 for accumulation mode aerosols in the urban
type air mass, as observed by ground-based
measurements. Small α values (less than 0.5) are
specific in areas where dust and large soil-derives
particles prevail, such as the areas close to the
Saharan desert. High values of α (greater than 1) are
caused by anthropogenic aerosols around industrial
areas or by biomass burning aerosols (Nakajima and
Higurashi, 1998) and have been estimated in
extremely turbid atmosphere (Canada et al., 1993).
Angström (Ångström, 1961, 1964) found that
α = 1.3 is a very good average value under normal
conditions. This result was also confirmed by Canada
et al. (1993).
The typical values of turbidity vary from 0 to
0.5. For values below 0.1 the turbidity is low. When it
ranges between 0.1 and 0.3, the turbidity can be
considered as moderate and for values higher than
0.3, the turbidity is considered high.
2.2. Data and methods
Sun-photometers with narrow spectral filters at
various wavelengths and bandwidths are the most
current instruments for monitoring turbidity (Harrison
et al., 1994; Holben et al., 1998). Values of the
Ångström turbidity coefficient β have been
determined using spectral sun photometer data. All
measurements reported in this section were made
with a Cimel sun–photometer, which is a part of the
Aerosol Robotic Network, ‘AERONET’ (Holben et
al., 1998). We used the AOD obtained from the
AERONET #395 sun-photometer (www.
gsfc.nasa.gov).
To compute AOD, the extinction coefficients
from a Lidar (RALI) and the total scattering
coefficients from a Nephelometer, were also used.
The Lidar and the #395 sun-photometer are
equipments of the Remote Sensing Laboratory of
INOE 2000 (Nemuc et al., 2008, Nicolae et al., 2010),
placed in Magurele (44°21′N 26°1′E). The integrating
nephelometer’s location is in the close neighborhood
of INOE 2000, at the Department of Atmosphere and
Earth Physics of the Faculty of Physics (Mihai and
Stefan, 2010). This instrument directly measures the
total scattering coefficients (7° to 170° angular
integration) and the hemispheric backscattering
coefficients (90° to 170°) at three visible wavelengths
(450, 550 and 700 nm), each with a bandwidth of
50nm. Thus, the instrument provides a total of six
parameters (total scattering and backscattering
coefficients for all three wavelengths).
The values of the wavelength parameter α
were those obtained from AERONET data base for
 Ångström turbidity in the lower layers of the troposphere

the sun-photometer, and those computed using the −6 −1 −6 −1

nephelometer data. The reference value of 1.3 was
also used. 20 days from May 2010 were selected to
analyze the atmospheric turbidity over Magurele. The
selection was guided by the existence of simultaneous
measurements with the sun-photometer and the lidar.
In addition, we chose to analyze May 2010 due to the
variety of particles present in the atmosphere by that
time, especially due to presence of volcanic ash
particles produced by the Icelandic volcanoes.
The power law relationship (1) has been used
to obtain the turbidity coefficient (β). For the
wavelength exponent α, the equation 2 has been used.
To compare the AOD and turbidity values obtained
from measurements with the three equipments the
Pearson statistics was computed.
3. Results and discussions
In order to determine the loading of the
atmosphere in Magurele on May 2010, daily
variations of total scattering coefficients from the
nephelometer were studied (Fig. 1a). The values of
the total scattering coefficients, for the three
wavelengths of the instrument, were found to vary
from 103 ⋅10 m to 653 ⋅10 m for the
wavelength of 550 nm, with an average value
(σ ± std ) of (177 ± 47.1) ⋅10 −6 m −1 . For these values
the computed Ångström parameter has the average
value of 1.51±0.29 (with a minimum value of -0.97
and a maximum value of 2.61). Small values of α and
large values of the scattering coefficients correspond
to the presence of large particle in the atmosphere.
The largest values of the total scattering
coefficient were measured on May 2nd, May 12th and
May 21th. In these days, the Ångström wavelength
had large values, meaning that the atmosphere was
loaded with fine particles resulted from air pollution.
The columnar AOD obtained with the sun-photometer
and computed from Lidar‘s extinction coefficients are
represented in Fig. 2a for the days with simultaneous
measurements of the two equipments. The AOD
values smaller than 0.5 show the dominance of fine
particles (size less than 1 µm). The highest values of
the AOD were obtained from both, the sun-
photometer and the lidar, for the same days (April 26,
May 2, May10 and June 18). As these values were
smaller than 0.5, it is expected to obtain large values
of turbidity on those days.

Fig. 1. Aerosol optical parameters for Magurele in May 2010 obtained with the nephelometer:
a) total scattering coefficients and b) Ångström parameter

Fig. 2. Temporal variation of the AOD determined by using the sun-photometer and the lidar (a) and AOD determined from
nephelometer, considering that the extinction coefficient equals the total scattering coefficient (b)

135
 Stefan et al./Environmental Engineering and Management Journal 10 (2011), 1, 133-138
The total scattering coefficients measured with
the nephelometer were used to compute the values of
AOD (Fig. 2b), neglecting the absorption. The AOD
values resulting from extinction coefficients are ten
times smaller than the common values. The
explanation consists in neglecting the absorption of
solar radiation. Therefore, the very small values of
turbidity obtained using these figures are not correct.
The temporal variation of the AOD presented in Fig.
2 is explained by the temporal variability of the
aerosol concentration in the atmospheric boundary
layer over Magurele.
Fig. 3. Ångström parameter determined from nephelometer
data, from sun-photometer data and the reference value 1.3,
for May 2010
The differences between the AOD values
obtained with the sun-photometer and from the Lidar
extinction coefficient (Fig. 2a) are explained by the
large Lidar’s overlap which affects the integral
columnar aerosol optical depth (Nicolae et al., 2010).
The difference in the highest values is smaller (0.05)
than the difference between the lowest values (0.7),
emphasizing the importance of the method used to
compute the AOD from extinction coefficient data
and the accuracy of measurements.
Fig. 4. (a) Turbidities obtained from sun-photometer AOD at 500nm and columnar AOD obtained from extinction coefficient
profile from Lidar (RALI) at 532nm in May 2010 for α =1.3; (b) Daily variations of Ångström turbidity at Magurele station on
selected period for α computed from sun-photometer, nephelometer data and α =1.3
136
To determine the Ångström turbidity the
values of the wavelength parameter were used, α
from AERONET database for the sun-photometer,
together with those computed using nephelometer
data and the reference value of 1.3. The comparison
between the reference Ångström parameter and the
Ångström parameter determined from nephelometer
and sun-photometer data (Fig. 3) shows that
nephelometer’s α values are much closer to the
reference value than the sun-photometer’s results.
The expected results for turbidity were similar
but not the same for the AOD’s values from the sun-
photometer and those computed from lidar
measurements, using the reference value of Ångstrom
parameter (Fig. 4a). The turbidity range was 0.2-1.0
(Fig. 4a), shifted toward larger values of AOD. The
results for temporal variation of turbidity in case of
few days of May 2010 (Fig. 4b) are similar to the
results from the literature (Canada et al., 1993). The
values obtained for the turbidity parameter in the days
of May 2010 varied in the range of (0.017÷1.63) with
a mean value of 0.13 for nephelometer data (Fig. 4b).
In the days of May turbidity was moderate (the values
around 0.3 correspond to moderate turbidity in the
atmosphere. As expected, the turbidity had largest
value in May 12, when a pollution episode was
observed.
In Fig. 5, the Ångström turbidity parameter
obtained using three different values for the
wavelength parameter α from the nephelometer,
from the sun-photometer AOD and the Ångström
reference value are represented. The linear regression
results between Ångström turbidity coefficients
obtained using α inferred from nephelometer data
and the reference α showed a very good value of R2,
i.e. 0.95, comparing to R2 = 0.86 for α from the
nephelometer – sun-photometer data correlation
procedure. This correlation is related to the
distribution of the wavelength parameter presented in
Fig. 3.
 Ångström turbidity in the lower layers of the troposphere

direction and intensity for the days with

Fig. 5. Comparison between the Ångström turbidity
coefficients obtained using the nephelometer,
the sun-photometer and the reference value of wavelength
parameter
The meteorological conditions determined by
the air mass characteristics may influence the
turbidity. The wind influences very much the local
turbidity by it enhancing the turbulence and
consequently the aerosol dispersion. The wind
measurements can be observed in Fig. 6 for May 10,
2010. Wind rose for May 2010 (not shown) and Fig.
6a emphasized dominance of the West, West – South
– West, South – West, East – South – East and South
– East wind directions (NOAA Air Resource Center-
HYSPLIT 4 model).
Fig. 6b represents the turbidity parameter
distribution considering the wind directions for
Magurele site with the highest frequency in May. The
highest mean turbidity values were found for WSW
and W directions (0.222 and 0.256, respectively) and
the lowest for ESE and SE (0.108 and 0.076,
respectively). The back-trajectories of air masses
confirm the dominant direction W-WSW for the first
part of May 2010 (Fig.7). The turbidity is usually
higher during this period of the year because air mass
advected over Romania has tropical characteristics
and is loaded with dust. The same dominant direction
can be observed at higher altitudes too.
The precipitations were not recorded when the
turbidity had maximum values. Local pollution also
influenced the values of the turbidity (Fig.7c).

Fig. 6. The wind direction frequency for May 2010 in Magurele site for the three wind speeds levels presented in that period
(a). The Ångström turbidity interval variations with the most dominant wind directions: ESE, SE, SW, WSW, W and for all wind
directions (b).

Fig. 7. The air mass back-trajectories for May 2010 (Hysplit4 model)

137
 Stefan et al./Environmental Engineering and Management Journal 10 (2011), 1, 133-138
Another meteorological parameter which can
influence the turbidity by thermal turbulence is the
temperature (not shown). The results emphasize the
importance of meteorological parameters describing
the air mass characteristics for the behavior of the air
turbidity in the lower atmosphere.
4. Concluding remarks
The results related to turbidity inferred from
AOD ( λ ) have shown the following:
- the AOD‘s values obtained from extinction
coefficient profiles from Lidar are affected by the
large overlap of the Lidar system.
- the measurements of total scattering coefficients
from nephelometer suggest loading of atmosphere
with aerosols but they cannot be used to determine
the AOD and consequently the Ångström turbidity
coefficient.
- the nephelometer’s data can be used to compute
the Ångström parameter used to determine the
Ångström turbidity.
Moreover, the results have shown a good
correlation between Ångström turbidity obtained
using Ångström wavelength parameter from
nephelometer and the constant reference value of 1.3.
The meteorological conditions associated to air
masses displacements are important in the study of
the turbidity variability. The wind greatly influences
the local turbidity by enhancing the turbulence and,
consequently, the aerosol dispersion. For future work
in this research area, a larger data base is needed,
during all seasons, to obtain good inferences on the
air quality by means of turbidity indicators.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge DELICE grant contract
FP7 REGPOT-2008-1 contract Nr. 229907
This work was supported by contract STVES 115266 from
Norway through the Norwegian Cooperation Programme
for Economic Growth and Sustainable Development in
Romania.
The AERONET database is maintained and made publicly
available by B.N. Holben (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, MA) and Philippe Goloub (Photons,
France).
The authors gratefully acknowledge the NOAA Air
Resources Laboratory (ARL) for the provision of the
HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model and/or READY
website (http://www.arl.noaa.gov/ready.php) used in this
publication.
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