Remote sensing measurements and investigation of the ABL temperature profile over large and broad mountain basin

Continuous Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) temperature profile measurements are of particular interest in a variety of applications and studies, including air pollution and pollutants dispersion, agricultural meteorology, aeronautical meteorology, mesoscale meteorology, weather forecasting, climate studies, energy applications. Several methods have developed and are applied for these measurements, being both direct (in situ) by using sensors located on tower structures, balloon-borne instrumentation, until aircraft techniques and indirect or remote sensing techniques. The latest mainly involve transmitted acoustic, radio, or light energy, and the detection of the scattered energy due to atmospheric targets. Passive techniques involve the measurement of radiation naturally emitted from the atmosphere, for example, as in microwave and infrared radiometry. In this work, the technique of passive microwave radiometry for the measurement of the temperature profile in ABL is described and some measurements are presented and analyzed. These measurements carried out in the industrial area of Western Macedonia, a large and broad mountain basin in NW Greece, by using the MTP-5 system. MTP-5 is a remote sensing instrument that measures microwave radiation emitted from the lower 1000 m of the atmosphere, within the Planetary Boundary Layer. The measurements of the temperature profile during two typical cases (hot and cold season) are analyzed and the ABL development are being investigated. Finally, some concluding remarks are provided.