Calendar Event Details

AEROCENTER: Matt DeLand

Affiliation: SSAI
Event Date: Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Location: G133
Time: 11:00 AM

Improved Observation and Characterization of Stratospheric Aerosols

Characterization of stratospheric aerosols is an important element of climate model energy budgets that is often poorly constrained.  A current review [Kremser et al., 2016] suggests that our long-term knowledge of extinction trends over periods that require combining data sets from different instruments is not known to better than ±20%.  A separate review [Ridley et al., 2014] gives an uncertainty of almost 50% on the magnitude of direct radiative forcing.  Better knowledge of stratospheric aerosol distribution would also provide important guidance for forecasts of the evolution of volcanic plume injections.

Satellite limb scattering measurements, such as those made by the Ozone Mapping and Profiling Suite (OMPS) Limb Profiler (LP) on the Suomi NPP satellite since April 2012, are the best available source of aerosol extinction profiles with global coverage and good vertical resolution.  However, the next LP instrument is not scheduled to fly until late 2021, which requires the S-NPP satellite to last well beyond its design lifetime to avoid an aerosol data gap.  The current LP instrument also has a substantial hemispheric difference in its sensitivity to aerosols as a consequence of how it samples along each orbit.

Our team is developing a compact satellite instrument called GAMS (Global Aerosol Monitoring System), using GSFC IRAD funding, that could be deployed in the next few years to complement OMPS LP aerosol measurements.  GAMS features a simplified optical design relative to OMPS LP (e.g. fixed wavelength selection using filters), but adds multiple viewing directions to increase spatial sampling and improve the distribution of measurement angles along the orbit track.  A prototype GAMS instrument, configured for a 3U Cubesat, will be assembled and tested this summer.  We will review the status of the GAMS project and discuss plans for further development

Posted or updated: Thursday, May 19, 2016

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