The global 3-D distribution of tropospheric aerosols as characterized by CALIOP

By D. Winker, J. Tackett, B. Getzewich, Zhaoyan Liu, Mark A. Vaughan, R. Rogers. 2012

514 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. The CALIOP lidar, carried on the CALIPSO satellite, has been acquiring global atmospheric profiles since June 2006. This dataset now offers the opportunity to characterize the global 3-D distribution of aerosol as well as seasonal and interannual variations, and confront aerosol models with observations in a way that has not been possible before. With that goal in mind, a monthly global gridded dataset of daytime and nighttime aerosol extinction profiles has been constructed, available as a Level 3 aerosol product. Averaged aerosol profiles for cloud-free and all-sky conditions are reported separately. This 6-yr dataset characterizes the global 3-dimensional distribution of tropospheric aerosol. Vertical distributions are seen to vary with season, as both source strengths and transport mechanisms vary. In most regions, clear-sky and all-sky mean aerosol profiles are found to be quite similar, implying a lack of correlation between high semi-transparent cloud and aerosol in the lower troposphere. An initial evaluation of the accuracy of the aerosol extinction profiles is presented. Detection limitations and the representivity of aerosol profiles in the upper troposphere are of particular concern. While results are preliminary, we present evidence that the monthly-mean CALIOP aerosol profiles provide quantitative characterization of elevated aerosol layers in major transport pathways. Aerosol extinction in the free troposphere in clean conditions, where the true aerosol extinction is typically 0.001 km−1 or less, is generally underestimated, however. The work described here forms an initial global 3-D aerosol climatology which we plan to extend and improve over time.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14a5633a89889218dc1b697053a57d84b81c5082

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Citations in the corpus

Aerosol–climate interactions in the Norwegian Earth System Model – NorESM1-M (2012, background): “screening and averaging procedure for near-surface extinction data from CALIOP is potentially also a source of large uncertainty (Winker et al., 2012).”
Aerosol classification from airborne HSRL and comparisons with the CALIPSO vertical feature mask (2013, methodology): “The Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) lidar instrument (Winker et al., 2009) aboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) satellite has already provided the first long-term global data set of aerosol vertical distribution, which has ”
Improvements to the OMI near-UV aerosol algorithm using A-train CALIOP and AIRS observations (2013, background): “A global three-dimensional representation of the atmospheric aerosol load from multi-year CALIOP observations has recently been made available (Winker et al., 2013).”
Bounding Global Aerosol Radiative Forcing of Climate Change (2020, unknown): “Res., 107 (D20), 8082. doi:2953 10.1029/2001JD0003802954 Winker, D. M., Tackett, J. L., Getzewich, B. J., Liu, Z., Vaughan, M. A., & Rogers,2955 R. R. (2013).”
Global observations of aerosol‐cloud‐precipitation‐climate interactions (2014, background): “Far from aerosol sources, where visible plume structure is lacking but aerosol layers aremore spatially extensive, detailed aerosol vertical distribution can be obtained from active sensors [Winker et al., 2009, 2010, 2012], nicely complementing the multiangle techniques [Kahn et al., 2008].”
Depolarization and lidar ratios at 355, 532, and 1064 nm and microphysical properties of aged tropospheric and stratospheric Canadian wildfire smoke (2018, background): “D aerosol climatology (Liu et al., 2008; Winker et al., 2010, 2013; Amiridis et al., 2015; Marinou et al., 2017).”