The role of aerosol layer height in quantifying aerosol absorption from ultraviolet satellite observations

Sun, Jiyunting; Veefkind, Pepijn; Nanda, Swadhin; van Velthoven, Peter; Levelt, Pieternel

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6319-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6319-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

TROPOMI on Sentinel-5 Precursor: first year in operation (AMT/ACP...

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6319-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 12

Research article

|

02 Dec 2019

Research article |

| 02 Dec 2019

The role of aerosol layer height in quantifying aerosol absorption from ultraviolet satellite observations

Jiyunting Sun, Pepijn Veefkind, Swadhin Nanda, Peter van Velthoven, and Pieternel Levelt

Data sets

OMI/Aura Near UV Aerosol Optical Depth and Single Scattering Albedo 1-orbit L2 Swath 13x24 km V003 O. O. Torres https://doi.org/10.5067/Aura/OMI/DATA2004

OMI/Aura Surface Reflectance Climatology L3 Global Gridded 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree V3 Q. Kleipool https://doi.org/10.5067/Aura/OMI/DATA3006

MODIS Atmosphere L2 Aerosol Product. NASA MODIS Adaptive Processing System R. Levy, C. Hsu, et al. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD04_L2.006

Short summary

Single scattering albedo (SSA) is critical for reducing uncertainties in radiative forcing assessment. This paper presents two methods to retrieve SSA from satellite observations of the near-UV absorbing aerosol index (UVAI). The first is physically based radiative transfer simulations; the second is a statistically based machine learning algorithm. The result of the latter is encouraging. Both methods show that the ALH is necessary to quantitatively interpret aerosol absorption from UVAI.