Aerosol classification from airborne HSRL and comparisons with the CALIPSO vertical feature mask

By S. Burton, Richard Ferrare, Mark A. Vaughan, Ali H. Omar, R. Rogers, Chris A. Hostetler, J. Hair. 2013

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. Aerosol classification products from the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) airborne High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL-1) on the NASA B200 aircraft are compared with coincident V3.01 aerosol classification products from the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument on the CALIPSO satellite. For CALIOP, aerosol classification is a key input to the aerosol retrieval, and must be inferred using aerosol loading-dependent observations and location information. In contrast, HSRL-1 makes direct measurements of aerosol intensive properties, including the lidar ratio, that provide information on aerosol type. In this study, comparisons are made for 109 underflights of the CALIOP orbit track. We find that 62% of the CALIOP marine layers and 54% of the polluted continental layers agree with HSRL-1 classification results. In addition, 80% of the CALIOP desert dust layers are classified as either dust or dusty mix byHSRL-1. However, agreement is less for CALIOP smoke (13%) and polluted dust (35%) layers. Specific case studies are examined, giving insight into the performance of the CALIOP aerosol type algorithm. In particular, we find that the CALIOP polluted dust type is overused due to an attenuation-related depolarization bias. Furthermore, the polluted dust type frequently includes mixtures of dust plus marine aerosol. Finally, we find that CALIOP's identification of internal boundaries between different aerosol types in contact with each other frequently do not reflect the actual transitions between aerosol types accurately. Based on these findings, we give recommendations which may help to improve the CALIOP aerosol type algorithms.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da586237dd9177020834da203225988a93851c23

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Citations in the corpus

Potential of polarization/Raman lidar to separate fine dust, coarse dust, maritime, and anthropogenic aerosol profiles (2017, methodology): “, 2011, 2015; Burton et al., 2015; Haarig et al., 2017a), disregarding the distance from the dust source and strength of the outbreak, and occuring particle sizes. Even during rather strong dust storms in central Asia, Hofer et al. (2017) found maximum 355 nm depolarization ratios of 0.”
Observations of the spectral dependence of linear particle depolarization ratio of aerosols using NASA Langley airborne High Spectral Resolution Lidar (2015, background): “Aerosol classification is one specific application of aerosol polarization measurements (Burton et al., 2012, 2013; Groß et al., 2013, 2014).”
An overview of the first decade of Polly NET : an emerging network of automated Raman-polarization lidars for continuous aerosol profiling (2016, methodology): “Burton et al. (2013) stated that two-wavelengths depolarization measurements might be appropriate for distinguishing those aerosol types while Müller et al. (2007) proposed to use the lidar ratio detected at two wavelengths.”