Speaker
Description
Nadir near-UV measurements are used routinely to derive aerosol optical depth and single scattering albedo of desert dust and carbonaceous aerosols. Accurate retrieval of these parameters, however, requires aerosol layer height (ALH) information. Over dark vegetated-land and water surfaces, ALH can be retrieved using Oxygen A and B band observations from sensors equipped with those capabilities such as the S5P-TROPOMI and DSCOVR-EPIC instruments. However, in arid and semi-arid areas, the Oxygen-absorption-based methods do not work well to derive ALH because of large near-IR surface reflectance over these areas. Though the persistent presence of tropospheric clouds over most surface types makes the use of limb observations inoperable for tropospheric aerosols, limb observations can be used to derive the vertical distribution of tropospheric aerosols over the world’s largest deserts thanks to the low frequency of occurrence of tropospheric clouds over these regions. In this presentation we will describe a method for combining data from the OMPS nadir mapper (NM) and limb-profiler (LP) instruments on the NPP satellite to characterize the properties of tropospheric aerosols over the world’s arid and semi-arid regions.
