Multispectral Observations Techniques for Air Pollution and Water Quality Assessment

The air quality in urban and remote areas together with the assessment of water composition in natural and artificial reservoirs are in the main interests of the scientific community as well as of the regional and national authorities and citizens. The data provided by the network of ?in situ? analyzers for air quality monitoring in urban areas, are utilized to produce Air Quality Indexes, which are used to alert the population and for traffic regulation purposes in many European cities. The First Air Quality Daughter Directive (1999/30/EC) established threshold levels for several atmospheric pollutants including the mass concentration of airborne particles.

The proposal is twofold since it foresees the setup of an Air Quality measurement station (AQS) with remote sensing equipment developed at the University of Evora and already build that need limited hardware upgrades, and the development of a new spectrometric system for the assessment of the water quality with spectrometric techniques underwater. The AQS will be equipped with standard equipment for in situ measurements and with the SPATRAM2 (SPectrometer for Atmospheric TRAcers Monitoring Rel. 2), coupled to the alt azimuth platform MIGE ? Multi Input Geometry Equipment and make use of the ?Passive DOAS? technique to derive the vertical profile of trace gases (mainly ozone, NO2, SO2, Formaldehyde (HCHO), Bromine Oxide (BrO) as well as the PAN compounds, with a vertical resolution of 200 m. SPATRAM2 will be also coupled with a different input device called HOLOD -Horizontal Looking device, being a telescope with an internal radiation source pointing to a retro reflector mirror, in order to apply the so called ?Active DOAS? configuration to derive the mean concentration of pollutants along the paths of measurements. The results obtained with this measurements technique are more representative of the actual atmospheric state than ? in situ? measurements, which represent local values, only.

Furthermore the proposal aims to develop, setup and deploy a new system called ASUV (Automatic Spectrometric Underwater Vehicle ) in order to assess the concentration of dissolved gases with marked absorption features in the UV-Vis-NIR spectral range in lakes, river and sea environments. For the spectral data analysis, also in this case, the DOAS technique will be used.