Publication Date:
2020-01-23
Description:
Spaceborne lidar observations have great potential to provide accurate global estimates of the aerosol direct radiative effect (DRE) in both clear and cloudy conditions. However, comparisons between observations from the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite (CALIPSO) and multiple years of Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) programs ground-based Raman lidars (RL) show that CALIPSO does not detect all radiatively significant aerosol, i.e. aerosol that directly modifies the Earths radiation budget. We estimated that using CALIPSO observations results in an underestimate of the magnitude of the global mean aerosol DRE by up to 54%. The ARM RL datasets along with NASA Langley airborne high spectral resolution lidar (HSRL) data from multiple field campaigns are used to compute the detection sensitivity required to accurately resolve the aerosol DRE. This shows that a lidar with a backscatter coefficient detection sensitivity of about 12x10(exp -4)km(exp -1)sr(exp -1) at 532nm would resolve all the aerosol needed to derive the DRE to within 1%.
Keywords:
Earth Resources and Remote Sensing
Type:
NF1676L-27456
,
Geophysical Research Letters; 44; 17; 9059-9067
Format:
application/pdf
