A comparison of estimated mixing height by multiple remote sensing instruments and its influence on air quality in urban regions

Urban areas suffer from high pollutant loadings due to their proximity to emission sources as well as transported aerosols. Therefore it is essential to have an accurate technique for measuring the pollutants and evaluate their effect. Since the atmosphere mixing height (MH) defines the total volume available for the pollutant transport and dispersion, it is important that air-quality models can provide realistic estimates. This paper studies multiple instruments for MH determination and their potential for validating air-quality model forecasts such as WRF. In addition, use of automated PBL height retrieval using wavelet analysis is briefly described and long term statistical comparisons of MH and WRF mixing height are obtained.