AGLITE Lidar: A Portable Elastic Lidar System for Investigating Aerosol and Wind Motions at or Around Agricultural Production Facilities

Authors: MARCHANT, CHRISTIAN - SPACE DYNAMICS LABORATORY; WILKERSON, THOMAS - SPACE DYNAMICS LABORATORY; BINGHAM, GAIL - SPACE DYNAMICS LABORATORY; ZAVYALOV, VLADIMIR - SPACE DYNAMICS LABORATORY; ANDERSON, JAN MARIE - SPACE DYNAMICS LABORATORY; WRIGHT, CORDELL - SPACE DYNAMICS LABORATORY; MARTIN, RANDY - UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY; SILVA, PHIL - UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY; HATFIELD, JERRY

Submitted to: Journal of Applied Remote Sensing (JARS)
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/25/2009
Publication Date: 7/15/2009
Citation: Marchant, C., Wilkerson, T.D., Bingham, G.E., Zavyalov, V.V., Anderson, J., Wright, C., Martin, R., Silva, P., Hatfield, J.L. 2009. AGLITE Lidar: A Portable Elastic Lidar System for Investigating Aerosol and Wind Motions at or Around Agricultural Production Facilities. Journal of Applied Remote Sensing (JARS). 3(1):033511.

Interpretive Summary: Measurement of air quality from agricultural operations is complex because of the dynamic nature of the air flow and exchanges that occur around buildings and agricultural machinery operations, e.g., tillage, harvesting. Air flow around buildings is complicated because of the interaction of the air flow with a building causing lifting of the air and is further complicated because of the heat generated by the roof of the building. Agricultural machinery operations are complex because they move across the field and are not stationary. To address this problem a portable lidar (Light ranging and detection) system was developed and calibrated with particulate samplers as a means of measuring the plume of particulates from agricultural operations. This unit has been deployed at a number of agricultural operations ranging from a swine facility, a dairy production unit, a cotton gin, and over a bare field. The lidar system can detect the movement of the particulate plume from an agricultural operation with sufficient resolution to permit quantitative assessments of particulate movement. This information will be valuable to scientists to help calibrate particulate dispersion models for agricultural systems.

Technical Abstract: The AGLITE Lidar is a portable scanning lidar that can be quickly deployed at agricultural and other air quality study sites. The purpose of AGLITE is to map the concentration of PM10 and PM2.5 in aerosol plumes from agricultural sources. AGLITE uses a high-repetition rate low-pulse-energy 3-wavelength YAG laser with photon counting detection together with a steerable pointing mirror to measure aerosol concentration with high spatial and temporal resolution. AGLITE has been used in field campaigns at a swine grow-finish facility near Ames, Iowa and other agricultural studies in Utah and California. The instrument is described, and performance and error analysis data are presented. In addition to aerosol mapping, the ability to extract wind-speed information from the lidar data is demonstrated.