Calendar Event Details
AEROCENTER: Lazaros Oreopoulos
Affiliation: NASA GSFC, Code 613
Event Date: Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Location: G133
Time: 11:00 AM
Revisiting Aerosol-Cloud-Precipitation relationships with MODIS C6 and other datasets
My presentation will examine whether clouds and precipitation have different characteristics under low and high aerosol loadings. It is well-recognized that detecting and interpreting such relationships from observations is quite challenging, so we are adopting approaches that deviate from commonly used past practices. First, we avoid a strictly regional analysis, but rather group our results by cloud regime, a framework in which all similar cloud mixtures at (100km)2 scales are grouped together regardless of location. The cloud regimes are obtained from MODIS C6 cloud-top-pressure/optical thickness joint histogram data. Second, recognizing that satellite aerosol retrievals in the vicinity of clouds can be problematic, we add MERRA-2 aerosol data as an additional reference point to the more traditional method of relying exclusively on observations. Third, we define “low” and “high” aerosol loadings in both an absolute and relative sense. We confine our analysis to the 50S-50N latitude zone because it represents the geographical coverage of our precipitation dataset (TMPA-3B42), and because of presumably cloud/aerosol retrievals are more reliable. We of course also take into account land-ocean contrasts within this part of the globe in our effort to discern whether high and low-cloud dominated regimes exhibit signals of expected interactions with aerosols such as invigoration, and first and second indirect effects.
Posted or updated: Monday, May 2, 2016
Print-friendly page (new window) • Back to the Calendar