• Atmosphere
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.525-535
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• 2019

Vertical distributions of aerosol mass concentrations over Seoul and Gangneung from January to February 2015 were investigated using aerosol Mie-scattering lidars. Vertical mass concentration of aerosol was calculated from the lidar data using KALION's algorithm and quantitatively compared with ground PM₁₀ concentration to obtain objectivity of data. The backward trajectories calculated using HYSPLIT (version 4) were clustered into 5 traces for Seoul and 6 traces for Gangneung, and the observed aerosol vertical mass distribution was analyzed for individual trajectories. Result from the analysis shows that, aerosol concentrations with in the planetary boundary layer were highest when airflows into the measurement points originated in the Shandong Peninsula or the Inner Mongolia. In addition, the difference of aerosol mass concentrations in the two regions below 1 km was about twice as large as that in the long range transport from the Shandong Peninsula compared to the local emission. This result shows that the air quality over Korea related to particulate matters are affected more by aerosol emissions in the upstream source regions and the associated transboundary transports than local emissions. This study also suggests that the use of local aerosol observations is critical for accurate simulations of aerosol-cloud interactions.

• Atmosphere
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.225-233
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• 2017

Korea has recently suffered from severe hazes, largely being long-range transported from China but frequently mixed with domestic pollution. It is important to identify the origin of the frequently-occurring hazes, which is however hard to clearly determine in a quantitative term. In this regard, we suggest a possible classification procedure of various hazes into long-range transported haze (LH), Yellow Sand (YS), and urban haze (UH), based on mass loading of fine particles, time lag of PM mass concentrations between two sites aligned with dominant wind direction, backward trajectory of air mass, and the mass ratio of PM2.5 to PM10. The analysis sites are Seoul (SL) and Baengnyeongdo (BN), which are distant about 200 km from each other in the west to east direction. Aerosol concentrations at BN are overall lower than those of SL, indicative of BN being a background site for SL. We found distinct time lag of PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations between BN and SL in case of both LH and YS, but the intensity of YS being stronger than LH. Time scale (e-folding time scale) of LH appears to be longer and more variable than YS, which implies that LH covers much larger spatial scale. In addition, we found linear and significant correlations between ${\tau}_a$ obtained from sunphotometer and ${\tau}_{cal}$ calculated from surface aerosol scattering coefficient for LH episodes, relative to few correlation between those for YS, which might be associated with transported height of YS being much higher than LH. Therefore surface PM concentrations for the YS period are thought to be not representative for vertical integrated amount of aerosol loadings, probably by virtue of decoupled structure of aerosol vertical distribution. Improvement of various hazes classification based on the current result would provide the public as well as researchers with more accurate information of LH, UH, and YS, in terms of temporal scale, size, vertical distribution of aerosols, etc.