AEROSOL SINGLE SCATTERING ALBEDO2

We retrieve the global distribution of columnar single scattering albedo (ω0) by taking advantage of the high sensitivity of satellite measurements at ultraviolet channels by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) to both aerosol optical depth and ω0, and the high sensitivity of satellite measu...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: R. -m. Hu, R. V. Martin, Short Title
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.144.3645
http://www-as.harvard.edu/chemistry/trop/publications/hu2005a.pdf
Description
Summary:We retrieve the global distribution of columnar single scattering albedo (ω0) by taking advantage of the high sensitivity of satellite measurements at ultraviolet channels by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) to both aerosol optical depth and ω0, and the high sensitivity of satellite measurements at visible channels by the Moderate Resolution Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MODIS) to aerosol optical depth. A radiative transfer model (LIDORT) is used to calculate the local ω0 that reproduces the TOMS aerosol index, when constrained by MODIS aerosol optical depth and by relative vertical profiles from a global chemical transport model (GEOS-CHEM). The retrieved ω0 at 360 nm is near 1 over the remote ocean, in contrast with values of 0.7 to 0.8 over regions dominated by biomass burning and mineral dust aerosol. The expected retrieval uncertainty is 15 percent. We validate our retrieval with measurements from the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET); the correlation coefficient, slope and intercept are 0.75, 0.93 and 0.078 respectively. 3 1.