Information on stratospheric aerosol characteristics contained in the SAGE satellite multiwavelength extinction measurements

Abstract

Aerosol models with monomodal and bimodal size distributions are used to simulate the retrieval of mass density, optical depth and asymmetry factor averaged over the solar spectrum, infrared optical depth and backscatter coefficient from the two-wavelength SAGE satellite extinction measurements. The solar optical depth is well retrieved. For the other parameters only brackets can be given for monomodal size distributions and the main difficulty appears with bimodal size distributions. The four-wavelength extinction measurements from the future SAGE II should lead to better retrieval.