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A ground-based backscatter Lidar, operating at 355nm was setup at the roof top of School of Physics, Universiti Sains Malaysia to study the aerosol content around Penang Island. During the operation of the Lidar, it had successfully obtained information on two haze events that struck Penang Island, which occurred during the month of July 2013 and March 2014, respectively. It was found that these two haze events showed different characteristics, such as the numbers and thickness of the aerosol layers. Multiple layers of aerosol were found in haze event during March 2014 and the aerosol layers were very thick. In contrast, only a single layer of aerosol was found in the haze event during July 2013 and the aerosol layer was relatively thin. Columnar aerosol optical depth (AOD) of these two haze events also showed some differences. Columnar AOD for the haze event occurred in July 2013 varied between 1.00±0.11 to 1.82±0.01, while columnar AOD for haze event occurred during March 2014 varied between 0.47±0.15 t...

Haze is a phenomenon which occurs when there is a great amount of tiny particulates suspended in the atmosphere. During the period of March 2014, a long period of haze event occurred in Penang, Malaysia. The haze condition was measured and monitored using a ground-based Lidar system. By using the measurements obtained, we evaluated the performance of the ECMWF MACC-II model. Lidar measurements showed that there was a thick aerosol layer confined in the planetary boundary layer (PBL) with extinction coefficients exceeding values of 0.3 km−1. The model however has underestimated the atmospheric conditions in Penang. Backward trajectories analysis was performed to identify aerosols sources and transport. It is speculated that the aerosols came from the North-East direction which was influenced by the North-East monsoon wind and some originated from the central eastern coast of Sumatra along the Straits of Malacca.

Aerosol is one of the important factors that will influence the air quality, visibility, clouds, and precipitation processes in the troposphere. In this work, we investigated the variation of aerosol during daytime in Penang, Malaysia in certain days within July 2013. Vertical LIDAR scattering ratio and backscattering profiles, and columnar optical properties (optical depth, Angstrom exponent) of aerosols were measured using Raymetrics LIDAR and a CIMEL sunphotometer respectively. Specifically, we have determined the daytime variation of intensity and distribution level of aerosol, as well as the planetary boundary layer (PBL) and cloud classification. Subsequently, the data of columnar aerosol optical depth (AOD) and size distribution in the atmospheric were used to quantify the properties of aerosol variation during daytime over Penang, Malaysia.

The problem of a circular disk with a radial edge crack is investigated theoretically. The disk is in an equilibrium state of generalized plane stress caused by a pair of concentrated forces loading on the disk circumference. The region of the cracked disk was mapped into the interior of a unit circle by using a conformal transformation. A boundary integral method was suggested to avoid the difficulty caused by the singularities of the transform function. The boundary value problem of the elastic cracked disk was solved analytically in a closed form. The stress intensity factor (SIF) at the tip of the crack was calculated using the complex potentials. The result shows that the smaller the load angle, the higher the value of the SIF.