SAM-CAAM: A Concept for Acquiring Systematic Aircraft Measurements to Characterize Aerosol Air Masses.

A modest program of systematic aircraft measurements can resolve key satellite-aerosol-data-record limitations. Satellite observations provide frequent, global aerosol-amount maps, but offer only loose aerosol property constraints needed for climate and air quality applications. We define and illustrate the feasibility of flying an aircraft payload to measure key aerosol optical, microphysical, and chemical properties .

The spectral signature of cloud spatial structure in shortwave irradiance.

In this paper, we used cloud imagery from a NASA field experiment in conjunction with three-dimensional radiative transfer calculations to show that cloud spatial structure manifests itself as a spectral signature in shortwave irradiance fields - specifically in transmittance and net horizontal photon transport in the visible and near-ultraviolet wavelength range. We found a robust correlation between the magnitude of net horizontal photon transport () and its spectral dependence (slope), which is scale-invariant and holds for the entire pixel population of a domain. This was surprising at first given the large degree of spatial inhomogeneity.