Calendar Event Details
CPC-AeroCenter seminar: Galina (Gala) Wind
Affiliation: SSAI
Event Date: Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Location: E108
Time: 11:00 AM
Validation of the MODIS Above-Cloud Aerosol Optical Properties product during ORACLES field campaign with MCARS
We have released the MODIS Above-Cloud Aerosol Optical Properties product (MOD_PRACAERO) as a Near Real Time (NRT) product in the LANCE system to be used during the ORACLES field campaign. We performed a number of MCARS simulations of the ORACLES area (boundary layer marine stratus off Angola and Namibia) using the GEOS-5 7km resolution Nature Run. MCARS output is identical in every way to an actual MODIS radiance file and is fully transparent to all operational algorithms for MODIS Atmospheres. Currently GCMs like GEOS-5 successfully assimilate available MODIS aerosol products such as MOD04 and MOD04_DB. However those products only provide information over clear sky. We used the MCARS-produced radiances to examine in detail performance of the MOD_PRACAERO code and its usefulness for data assimilation purposes, looking to constrain retrieval error and determine rates at which the product may produce a retrieval when there should not have been one, a false-positive result. We found that the MOD_PRACERO algorithm performed very well for the given simulated conditions and matched well the prescribed model “truth” under a variety of retrieval error constraints. The suggested filtering by cloud optical thickness further improves the agreement with “ground truth” and we would strongly recommend the product for data assimilation into the GEOS-5.
Posted or updated: Thursday, October 27, 2016
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