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| Titel |
Weekly cycle patterns of total cloud cover over Europe and their connection to aerosol weekly variability and synoptic transport |
| VerfasserIn |
Aristeidis Georgoulias, Konstantinos Kourtidis |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250046001
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| Zusammenfassung |
| In this work, we have focused on the spatial and temporal variability of the total cloud
fraction and aerosol weekly cycle over Europe (30oN-70oN, 15oW-60oE) as these were
recorded from TERRA MODIS and AQUA MODIS satellite instruments. Cloud
and aerosol optical properties retrieved from TERRA (2/2000-2/2009) and AQUA
(7/2002-12/2008) MODIS were used in order to produce an index capable of detecting the
weekly cycle of these parameters from space. First, the general aerosol optical depth
(AOD550) weekly patterns were defined with the use of the satellite-based index and 6
regions of interest were selected. A second method was used afterwards for the
investigation of the weekly variability and the statistical significance of the weekly
cycle over the selected regions. The weekly cycle was also examined on a seasonal
basis. An effort to correlate the differing aerosol weekly variability appearing over
different regions in Europe with the dominating synoptic wind patterns is presented
here. For this, synoptic wind speed and direction from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis
dataset were used in conjunction with the MODIS datasets. The same procedure
was then repeated for total cloud cover (TCC), and the cloud weekly patterns were
compared to the aerosol weekly patterns. The general AOD550-TCC relationships for
the 6 regions of interest were calculated on a seasonal basis. The ability of these
relationships to reproduce the weekly variability of TCC from the weekly variability of
AOD550,manifests the aerosol impact on the weekly cycle of cloud coverage over Europe. |
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