Lidar-Derived Aerosol Properties from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard during the MOSAiC Spring 2020

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Jonas Dube, Christine Böckmann, Christoph Ritter
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2022
• Subjects: aerosol; Arctic haze; lidar; microphysical properties; backtrajectories; Ny-Ålesund; Science; Q; Arctic; Svalbard; Ny Ålesund
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14112578; https://doaj.org/article/9d259fc99ded46299189ad94ebd3e7a3

In this work, we present Raman lidar data (from a Nd:YAG operating at <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>355</mn><mspace width="0.166667em"></mspace></mrow></semantics></math> nm, <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>532</mn><mspace width="0.166667em"></mspace></mrow></semantics></math> nm and <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>1064</mn><mspace width="0.166667em"></mspace></mrow></semantics></math> nm) from the international research village Ny-Ålesund for the time period of January to April 2020 during the Arctic haze season of the MOSAiC winter. We present values of the aerosol backscatter, the lidar ratio and the backscatter Ångström exponent, though the latter depends on wavelength. The aerosol polarization was generally below 2%, indicating mostly spherical particles. We observed that events with high backscatter and high lidar ratio did not coincide. In fact, the highest lidar ratios (LR > 75 sr at <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>532</mn><mspace width="0.166667em"></mspace></mrow></semantics></math> nm) were already found by January and may have been caused by hygroscopic growth, rather than by advection of more continental aerosol. Further, we performed an inversion of the lidar data to retrieve a refractive index and a size distribution of the aerosol. Our results suggest that in the free troposphere (above ≈2500 m) the aerosol size distribution is quite constant in time, with dominance of small particles with a modal radius well below <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" ...