Yasunori SAITO^*, Hidehumi KURATA, Yuta HARA, Fumitoshi KOBAYASHI, Takuya KAWAHARA and Akio NOMURA

Department of Information Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shinshu University, 4-17-1 Wakasato, Nagano 380-8553, Japan

(Received December 21, 2004; Accepted April 20, 2005)

A scanning lidar system was developed to watch the nighttime diffusion process of plume from a smokestack of a large incinerator located around 3 km from the system. Observed data sets were visualized as three dimensional images in which could be seen the diffusion pattern from any direction, and this made it easy to investigate the exhaust dynamics. Observation results showed that the original plume extended at least 1.6 km, where there was a residential area, from the smokestack increasing in diameter to about 500 m. High density aerosols originating from the smokestack were measured in that area even at midnight. The lidar system performance as a plume watchdog station was discussed from the standpoint of publichealth-related plume monitoring.

Key words: Mie lidar, scanning lidar, three dimensional monitoring, plume dynamics, smokestack, watchdog station

^*Corresponding author. E-mail address: saitoh@cs.shinshu-u.ac.jp