Abstract
One of the main missions of the Telescope Array (TA) project is to characterize Ultra-High Energy
Cosmic Rays (UHECR) based on observations of atmospheric fluorescence, which is primarily emitted
from nitrogen molecules excited by secondary particles of UHECR. The TA system is distributed over
an area of 700 km 2 in the wilderness. The atmospheric fluorescence is detected at three measurement
stations at the site using telescopes called Fluorescence Detectors (FDs). Ultraviolet (UV) lights from
nitrogen fluorescence are absorbed by other atmospheric molecules and aerosols, affecting the measurement
with FDs. Therefore, the transparency of the atmosphere for UV lights has been measured on site
using a well-characterized Mie-LIDAR system. The main issue was that the Mie-LIDAR could provide
an atmospheric transparency at one measurement station, which might not be the same as the one measured
at the other stations, since they are apart from each other by several tens of kilometers. To address
this issue, we installed a new UV laser system at the location equidistant from the three stations in order
to measure atmospheric transparency at all stations at the same time. A parallel UV laser beam was
emitted vertically from the ground to the sky, and the scattered light was measured with FDs at each station.
After four years of measurements, we concluded that the atmospheric transparency at the three stations
was equivalent with a 95% correlation