Abstract

Biomass burning in southwestern Africa produces smoke plumes that are transported over the Atlantic Ocean and overlie vast regions of stratocumulus clouds. This aerosol layer contributes to direct and indirect radiative forcing of the atmosphere in this region, particularly during the months of August, September and October. There was a multi-year international campaign to study this aerosol and its interactions with clouds. Here we report on the evolution of aerosol distributions and properties as measured by the airborne high spectral resolution lidar (HSRL) during the ORACLES (Observations of Aerosols above Clouds and their intEractionS) campaign in September 2016. The NASA Langley HSRL-2 instrument was flown on the NASA ER-2 aircraft for several days in September 2016. Data were aggregated at two pairs of 2° × 2° grid boxes to examine the evolution of the vertical profile of aerosol properties during transport over the ocean. Results showed that the structure of the profile of aerosol extinction and microphysical properties is maintained over a one to two-day time scale. The fraction of aerosol in the fine mode between 50 and 500 nm remained above 0.95 and the effective radius of this fine mode was 0.16 μm from 3 to 5 km in altitude. This indicates that there is essentially no scavenging or dry deposition at these altitudes. Moreover, there is very little day to day variation in these properties, such that time sampling as happens in such campaigns, may be representative of longer periods such as monthly means. Below 3 km there is considerable mixing with larger aerosol, most likely continental source near land. Furthermore, these measurements indicated that there was a distinct gap between the bottom of the aerosol layer and cloud tops at the selected locations as evidenced by a layer of several hundred meters that contained relatively low aerosol extinction values above the clouds.

Highlights

  • Aerosols are often considered as the most confounding element in the climate system when simulating futureOcean and overlie vast regions of stratocumulus clouds

  • In this study of the vertically resolved evolving properties of biomass burning (BB) aerosol, we present key lidar measurements and

  • This result is of some importance for climate studies in which the radiative properties of BB aerosol are input to the calculation of radiative forcing

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Summary

Introduction

Ocean and overlie vast regions of stratocumulus clouds. This aerosol layer contributes to direct and indirect radiative forcing of the atmosphere in this region, during the months of August, September and October. The grid box pairs A/B and C/D can provide information on the evolution of the microphysics and vertical distribution of BB aerosol plumes after leaving the continent This strategy is similar to that used in comparisons of models with observations for this campaign by Shinozuka et al (2020), who showed that observations made on the sampled air as seen from Fig. 1. Since HSRL-2 includes the capability to measure backscatter at three wavelengths and extinction at two wavelengths, “3β+2α” microphysical retrieval algorithms (Müller et al, 1999a, 1999b; Veselovskii et al, 2002) are used to retrieve height-resolved parameters such as aerosol effective radius and number, surface and volume concentrations (Müller et al, 2014, Sawamura et al, 2016)

Results
Microphysics
Conclusions

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