Abstract
Recently, two separately observed enhancements of stratospheric dust concentrations have been detected by Kinsell Coulson and Thomas Defoor with ruby lidar and sun photometers at the NOAA Geophysical Monitoring for Climatic Change (GMCC) Observatory on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The popular press has referred to the two episodes as the ‘mystery cloud’ (the source of the dust has not been definitively identified but is presumed to be volcanic) and the ‘monster cloud.’ Representative highlights of the observations at Mauna Loa are given here. The figure shows plots of stratospheric dust profiles as the ratio of (Rayleigh + Mie)/Rayleigh scattering observed by lidar. The bottom plot (a) represents data from December 30, 1981, showing a rather clean stratosphere but with some dust above 18 km. The middle plot (b) shows the first lidar observation of the ‘mystery cloud’ on January 28, 1982. The upper plot (c) shows the first lidar observation of the ‘monster cloud’ on April 9, 1982. Note the different ordinate scale on this plot. Other observations at Mauna Loa suggest that both clouds were over Hawaii several days before being positively detected by lidar.
Published Version
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