An atmospheric transparency was measured using a LIDAR with a pulsed UV laser (355nm) at the observation site of Telescope Array in Utah, USA. The measurement at night for two years in 2007∼2009 revealed that the extinction coefficient by aerosol at the ground level is 0.033−0.012+0.016km−1 and the vertical aerosol optical depth at 5km above the ground is 0.035−0.013+0.019. A model of the altitudinal aerosol distribution was built based on these measurements for the analysis of atmospheric attenuation of the fluorescence light generated by ultra high energy cosmic rays.
@article{arxiv.1109.1196,
title = {The atmospheric transparency measured with a LIDAR system at the Telescope Array experiment},
author = {Takayuki Tomida and Yusuke Tsuyuguchi and Takahito Arai and Takuya Benno and Michiyuki Chikawa and Koji Doura and Masaki Fukushima and Kazunori Hiyama and Ken Honda and Daisuke Ikeda and John N. Matthews and Toru Nakamura and Daisuke Oku and Hiroyuki Sagawa and Hisao Tokuno and Yuichiro Tameda and Gordon B. Thomson and Yoshiki Tsunesada and Shigeharu Udo and Hisashi Ukai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.1196},
year = {2011}
}