Recent advances on the creation of an aerosol monitoring network to identify volcanic ash transport in Argentina and Chile using lidars in the frame of a SATREPS collaboration

RISTORI P, OTERO L, PAPANDREA S, SHIMIZU A, JIN Y, SUGIMOTO N, MIZUNO A; QUEL E

San Diego

Conferencia; Lidar Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring XV; 2015

After installing the fifth lidar station on February 2015 in Argentina financed by the Ministry of the Defense tomitigate the problems generated by the presence of volcanic ash in the region, there are still many challengesremaining for this aerosol monitoring network. A tri-national collaboration (Japan-Chile-Argentina), part Scienceand Technology Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS) programme, focused on the ?Developmentof the Social Management System for Atmospheric Environmental Risks in South America? intends to bringsolutions to these challenges. In first place it will upgrade the lidars to add depolarization capabilities to betteridentify the kind of aerosol suspended in the atmosphere. In second place it intends to expand its observingdomain actually confined to the Patagonic region to the north and south of Argentina and Chile adding new lidars.In third place it will provide state of the art technology adding a high spectral resolution channel to some of theselidars. The collaboration is also working on building the protocols for system operation and maintenance, dataanalysis and interpretation in collaboration with the weather services in Argentina and Chile in order to achieve aneffective and continuous observation.