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| Titel |
Retrieval of desert dust aerosol vertical profiles from IASI measurements in the TIR atmospheric window |
| VerfasserIn |
S. Vandenbussche, S. Kochenova, A. C. Vandaele, N. Kumps, M. Mazière |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
1867-1381
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Atmospheric Measurement Techniques ; 6, no. 10 ; Nr. 6, no. 10 (2013-10-07), S.2577-2591 |
| Datensatznummer |
250085076
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/amt-6-2577-2013.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Desert dust aerosols are the most prominent tropospheric aerosols,
playing an important role in the earth's climate. However, their
radiative forcing is currently not known with sufficient precision to
even determine its sign. The sources of uncertainty are multiple, one
of them being a poor characterisation of the dust aerosol's vertical
profile on a global scale. In this work, we tackle this scientific
issue by designing a method for retrieving dust aerosol vertical
profiles from Thermal Infrared measurements by Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) instruments
onboard the Metop satellite series. IASI offers almost global coverage
twice a day, and long (past and future) time series of radiances,
therefore being extremely well suited for climate studies. Our
retrieval follows Rodger's formalism and is based on a two-step
approach, treating separately the issues of low altitude sensitivity
and difficult a priori definition. We compare our results for
a selected test case above the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa in
June 2009, with optical depth data from MODIS, aerosol absorbing index
from GOME-2 and OMI, and vertical profiles of extinction coefficients
from CALIOP. We also use literature information on desert dust sources
to interpret our results above land. Our retrievals provide perfectly
reasonable results in terms of optical depth. The retrieved vertical
profiles (with on average 1.5 degrees of freedom) show most of the
time sensitivity down to the lowest layer, and agree well with CALIOP
extinction profiles for medium to high dust optical depth. We conclude
that this new method is extremely promising for improving the
scientific knowledge about the 3-D distribution of desert dust
aerosols in the atmosphere. |
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