Abstract
A multi-spectral photometer was set up as an NASA/AERONET site at Kinki University campus in Higashi-Osaka in 2002 for measuring urban aerosols. In addition, the SPM-613D (Kimoto Electric) commenced measurement of suspended particles matter (SPM) as $PM_{10}$ and $PM_{2.5}$ on March 15, 2004 at the same AERONET site. The obtained results revealed that the poor air quality of the Higashi-Osaka site is due not only to anthropogenic particles from local emissions, such as diesel vehicles and chemical industries, but also to dust particles brought from continental desert areas by large scale climatic conditions. To understand the characteristics of background atmosphere over Higashi-Osaka, we examined the relationship between $PM_{2.5}$ concentration and aerosol optical thickness (AOT) at a wavelength of 0.87 μm based on AERONET data for background atmosphere (AOT<0.2). We obtained a linear regression line between AOT and $PM_{2.5}$ concentration. Using the linear relationships between AOT and $PM_{2.5}$, we show ground-level concentrations of $PM_{2.5}$ of background atmosphere from Terra/MODIS satellite measurements.