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Abstract
Pollution, duststorms and sandstorms regularly devastate Northeast Asia and cause considerable damage to transportation system and public health; further, these events are conceived to be one of the very important indices for estimating the global warming and desertification. Previously, yellow sand events were considered natural phenomena that originate in deserts and arid areas. However, the greater scale and frequency of these events in recent years are considered to be the result of human activities such as overgrazing and over-cultivation. Japan, Korea, Cina and Mongolia are directly concerned to prevent and control these storms and have been able to some extent to provide forecasts and early warnings. In this framework, to improve the accuracy of forecasting, two compact and rugged eye safe Lidars, the EZ LIDAR™, developed by LEOSPHERE (France), were deployed in Seoul, Korea and Katmandu, Nepal (in the frame of NASA/TIGER-Z campaign) in order to detect and study yellow sand events and optical and microphysical properties of the aerosols in the Gange basin, thanks to its depolarization channel and scan capabilities. The preliminary results, showed in this paper, of these measurement campaigns put in evidence that EZ Lidars, for its capabilities of operating unattended day and night under each atmospheric condition, are mature to be deployed in a global network to study long-range transport and aerosol optical properties.