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Satellite Remote Sensing of Aerosol ForcingThe role of aerosol forcing remains one of the largest uncertainties in estimating man's impact on the global climate system. One school of thought suggests that remote sensing by satellite sensors will provide the data necessary to narrow these uncertainties. While satellite measurements of direct aerosol forcing appear to be straightforward, satellite measurements of aerosol indirect forcing will be more complicated. Pioneering studies identified indirect aerosol forcing using AVHRR data in the biomass burning regions of Brazil. We have expanded this analysis with AVHRR to include an additional year of data and assimilated water vapor fields. The results show similar latitudinal dependence as reported by Kaufman and Fraser, but by using water vapor observations we conclude that latitude is not a proxy for water vapor and the strength of the indirect effect is not correlated to water vapor amounts. In addition to the AVHRR study we have identified indirect aerosol forcing in Brazil at much smaller spatial scales using the MODIS Airborne Simulator. The strength of the indirect effect appears to be related to cloud type and cloud dynamics. There is a suggestion that some of the cloud dynamics may be influenced by smoke destabilization of the atmospheric column. Finally, this study attempts to quantify remote sensing limitations due to the accuracy limits of the retrieval algorithms. We use a combination of numerical aerosol transport models, ground-based AERONET data and ISCCP cloud climatology to determine how much of the forcing occurs in regions too clean to determine from satellite retrievals.
Document ID
20000024928
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Preprint (Draft being sent to journal)
Authors
Remer, Lorraine
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Kaufman, Yoram
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Ramaprasad, Jaya
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Procopio, Aline
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Levin, Zev
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Date Acquired
August 19, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 1999
Subject Category
Environment Pollution
Meeting Information
Meeting: Aerosol-Cloud
Location: Kyoto
Country: Japan
Start Date: December 1, 1999
End Date: December 3, 1999
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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