Estimating aerosol emission from SPEXone on the NASA PACE mission using an ensemble Kalman smoother: observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs)

Abstract

Abstract. We present a top-down approach for aerosol emission estimation from Spectropolarimeter for Planetary Exploration (SPEXone) polarimetric retrievals related to the aerosol amount, size, and absorption using a fixed-lag ensemble Kalman smoother (LETKS) in combination with the ECHAM-HAM model. We assess the system by performing observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs) in order to evaluate the ability of the future multi-angle polarimeter instrument, SPEXone, as well as a satellite with near-perfect global coverage. In our OSSEs, the nature run (NAT) is a simulation by the global climate aerosol model ECHAM-HAM with altered aerosol emissions. The control (CTL) and the data assimilation (DAS) experiments are composed of an ensemble of ECHAM-HAM simulations, where the default aerosol emissions are perturbed with factors taken from a Gaussian distribution. Synthetic observations, specifically aerosol optical depth at 550 nm (AOD550), Ångström exponent from 550 to 865 nm (AE550–865), and single-scattering albedo at 550 nm (SSA550) are assimilated in order to estimate the aerosol emission fluxes of desert dust (DU), sea salt (SS), organic carbon (OC), black carbon (BC), and sulfate (SO4), along with the emission fluxes of two SO4 precursor gases (SO2, DMS). The prior emission global relative mean absolute error (MAE) before the assimilation ranges from 33 % to 117 %. Depending on the species, the assimilated observations sampled using the satellite with near-perfect global coverage reduce this error to equal to or lower than 5 %. Despite its limited coverage, the SPEXone sampling shows similar results, with somewhat larger errors for DU and SS (both having a MAE equal to 11 %). Further, experiments show that doubling the measurement error increases the global relative MAE up to 22 % for DU and SS. In addition, our results reveal that when the wind of DAS uses a different reanalysis dataset (ERA5 instead of ERA-Interim) to the NAT, the estimated SS emissions are negatively affected the most, while other aerosol species are negatively affected to a smaller extent. If the DAS uses dust or sea salt emission parametrizations that are very different from the NAT, posterior emissions can still be successfully estimated, but this experiment revealed that the source location is important for the estimation of dust emissions. This work suggests that the upcoming SPEXone sensor will provide observations related to aerosol amount, size, and absorption with sufficient coverage and accuracy in order to estimate aerosol emissions.