Study of tropospheric aerosols and clouds with Raman lidar technique (Invited Paper)

Abstract

We have explored a multi (dual))-wavelength Raman-lidar observation of tropospheric aerosols and clouds at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology (TUMST) in Tokyo, Japan since the February of 2002. Here we present the results on lofted Asian dust and Siberian forest-fire smoke plumes occured in the spring of 2003. The Asian-dust layer shows that the particle depolarization ratio (PDR) at 532 nm is higher than -20%, and the extinction-to-backscatter ratio (lidar ratio) at 355 nm is ~49 sr, which is close to that at 532 nm of ~43 sr. On the contrary, the smoke layers show that the PDR is lower than ~10% or less, and the lidar ratio at 355 nm is ~40 sr, which is considerably lower that that at 532 nm of ~65 sr. We also applied an inversion algorithm for the smoke case. The effective radius and the single-scattering albedo were found as ~0.22μm and ~0.95 at 532 nm. These microphysical results are consistent with the ones retrieved from the collocated skyradiometer analysis. We also estimated the aerosol radiative forcing for the smoke case using the radiative transfer code with these height-resolved microphysical properties.