Horizontal eye-safe Mie lidar for monitoring of urban aerosols in Macao

A new horizontal eye-safe lidar system has been developed for long-term monitoring of aerosol distribution over an urban area in Macao. The lidar system using a 532 nm micro-pulse laser is made eye-safe by expanding the beam diameter to 70 mm. The detector used is a fast photon counting photomultiplier tube with a narrow bandwidth interference filter to cut down the sky background. This system is the first lidar system operated in Macao to study the local aerosol distribution. We will discuss the method of data acquisition and inversion algorithm in this paper. Recent results from such a new lidar system together with some high pollution episodes will be presented. Developments and the possibility of using this lidar for CALIPSO ground validation will also be discussed.