Abstract
A new algorithm is described for joint retrievals of the aerosol optical depth and spectral absorption from EPIC observations in the UV—Vis spectral range. The retrievals are illustrated on examples of the wildfire smoke events over North America, and dust storms over greater Sahara region in 2018. An initial evaluation of single scattering albedo (SSA) at 443 nm over these regions shows a good agreement with AERONET data, generally within the uncertainty of AERONET SSA of ± 0.03. A particularly good agreement is achieved for dust with R~0.62, rmse~0.02, negligible bias, and 85% points within the expected error. This new capability is part of version 2 MAIAC EPIC algorithm. The v2 algorithm has recently completed reprocessing of the EPIC record covering the period of 2015–2020.
Highlights
Absorption is an important aerosol property determining, along with its total loading, aerosol-radiation and aerosol-cloud interactions (Boucher et al, 2013)
We present a new approach to derive aerosol optical depth (AOD) and spectral aerosol absorption from observations of the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) onboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite located at Lagrange-1 (L1) point
This paper described a new algorithm for joint retrievals of the aerosol optical depth and spectral absorption from EPIC observations in the UV–Vis spectral range
Summary
Absorption is an important aerosol property determining, along with its total loading, aerosol-radiation and aerosol-cloud interactions (Boucher et al, 2013). The bottom row shows results for May 29 for the dust storm in West Africa It is characterized by the highest spectral dependence of absorption (SAE) and lowest SSA in the Blue-UV range, indicating enhanced hematite content. The last plot (c) shows validation of MAIAC AOD from flexible retrievals for 103 sites In this case, we used results for the 1 km aerosol height, which are not generally representative. EPIC displays much higher values of SAE (b) than AERONET, which is expected from the properties of brown carbon where EPIC’ sensitivity to parameter b mainly comes from the two UV channels This is indicated by both the color of points and the offset along the y-axis, as illustrated by the blue line. This comparison indicates an overall robust performance of the developed algorithm
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
