Black carbon aerosol number and mass concentration measurements by picosecond short-range elastic backscatter lidar

Black carbon aerosol emissions are recognized as contributors to global warming and air pollution. There remains, however, a lack of in-situ techniques to remotely quantify black carbon aerosol particles with high range and time resolution. This article presents for the first time, to our knowledge, a direct and contact-free remote measurement of black carbon aerosol number and mass concentration less than ten of meters from the emission source. This is done with a novel picosecond short-range elastic backscatter lidar (PSR-EBL) technique. To address the complexity of retrieving lidar products at short measurement ranges, we apply a forward inversion method featuring radiometric lidar calibration. Our method is based on an extension of a well-established light-scattering model, the Rayleigh-Debye-Gans for Fractal-Aggregates (RDG-FA) theory, which computes an analytical expression for lidar parameters. These parameters are the backscattering cross-sections and the lidar ratio for black carbon fractal aggregates. Using a small-scale Jet A-1 kerosene pool fire, it is shown that our technique can quantify the aerosol number and mass concentration with centimetre range-resolution and millisecond time-resolution.