Showing papers by "Andrew A. Lacis published in 2007"

Long-Term Satellite Record Reveals Likely Recent Aerosol Trend

Abstract: Analysis of the long-term Global Aerosol Climatology Project data set reveals a likely decrease of the global optical thickness of tropospheric aerosols by as much as 0.03 during the period from 1991 to 2005. This recent trend mirrors the concurrent global increase in solar radiation fluxes at Earth's surface and may have contributed to recent changes in surface climate.

Past, present, and future of global aerosol climatologies derived from satellite observations: A perspective

Abstract: A number of passive satellite instruments have been used to develop global climatologies of terrestrial tropospheric aerosols by analyzing the properties of sunlight reflected by the atmosphere–surface system. The outcome of these efforts are several climatologies which all purport to represent the same aerosol characteristics such as optical thickness and size. However, the quantitative differences between these climatologies have been found to far exceed the corresponding individual uncertainty claims. The magnitude of these differences is alarming and necessitates a detailed critical assessment and integrated analysis that would go far beyond simple intercomparisons of various satellite products and comparisons of satellite aerosol optical thickness results with ground-based sun-photometer data. This paper outlines the framework for a global long-term satellite climatology of aerosol properties based on a consistent combination of previous, current, and near-future satellite retrievals. We also discuss potential future strategies for deriving a much improved aerosol climatology from Earth-orbiting satellites.

Do sulfate and nitrate coatings on mineral dust have important effects on radiative properties and climate modeling

Abstract: [1] Coating of mineral dust particles by air pollutants leads to core-mantle particles. These composite aerosols could interact differently with atmospheric radiation than the uncoated dust. In our simplified radiative calculations we assumed that a spherical dust core is covered uniformly by a liquid refractive material, such as sulfate or nitrate. Theoretical calculations of optical properties of such particles show that the single-scattering albedo and the asymmetry parameter of core-mantle aerosols only differ significantly from uncoated dust if coating layers exceed 20% of the radius of the dust core. Global simulations of sulfate/nitrate-coated dust particles show that the thickness of the shell can be expected to range from 0 to 20% of the radius of the dust core. The result of this work is that mineral dust particles can be treated as external mixture within radiative calculations but the coating processes lead to changed loads in sulfate, nitrate, and mineral dust aerosol loads and therefore change their impact on Earth radiation. The combined anthropogenic forcing of dust, nitrate, and sulfate aerosols is −0.1 W/m2; however, excluding heterogeneous interactions leads to a 3 times larger negative forcing.

Using EOF analysis to qualitatively analyze, and identify inhomogeneities in, data from ground-based aerosol monitoring instruments

Abstract: [1] Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis is performed on ground-based shadowband radiometer and Sun photometer data. The data come from Multifilter Rotating Shadowband Radiometer (MFRSR) instruments located at the central and extended facilities of the Southern Great Plains (SGP) research site of the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, as well as the Rotating Shadowband Spectroradiometer (RSS) 102 and 105 and the CIMEL Sun photometer CSPHOT located at the central facility at SGP. The EOFs show the variability in total aerosol optical depth and provide some qualitative information on the separation of the coarse and fine aerosol modes. In addition, as has been demonstrated previously with satellite data, EOF analysis also exposes several flaws and inconsistencies within the ground-based data sets. These inhomogeneities include optical depth anomalies in some MFRSR filters, wavelength shifts in the RSS, and problems with the data transmitter of the CIMEL instrument. Therefore EOF analysis is shown to be a quick and effective means not only of assessing the general aerosol behavior in the air above a particular monitoring instrument, but also of identifying both known and unanticipated influences on the data coming from within the instrument itself.