Aerosol Plume Characterization From Multitemporal Hyperspectral Analysis

In this paper, we focus on airborne hyperspectral imaging methodology to characterize particulate matter (PM) near industrial emission sources. Two short-term intensive campaigns were carried out in the vicinity of a refinery in the south of France, in September 2015 and February 2016. Different protocols of in situ PM measurements were performed, at stack measurements (flow rate and offline chemical analysis) and online measurement at the refinery border (size distribution, concentration, and chemistry of aerosols). A multitemporal methodology to retrieve aerosol type, to map the aerosol concentration, and to quantify mass flow rate from airborne hyperspectral data is described in this paper. This method applied to the refinery detected plume from the main stack yields a black carbon to sulfate ratio of 10/90 in mass inside the plume, with an average size distribution smaller than 100 nm. These results are in a good agreement with the online analysis of aerosols at the refinery border. The resulting quantitative map with a metric spatial resolution leads to an estimated flow rate of about 1 g/s and is in a good agreement with in situ stack measurements and modeling.