Multi-angular polarimetric remote sensing to pinpoint global aerosol absorption and direct radiative forcing.

Quantitative estimations of atmospheric aerosol absorption are rather uncertain due to the lack of reliable information about the global distribution. Because the information about aerosol properties is commonly provided by single-viewing photometric satellite sensors that are not sensitive to aerosol absorption. Consequently, the uncertainty in aerosol radiative forcing remains one of the largest in the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5 and AR6).

Advanced characterisation of aerosol size properties from measurements of spectral optical depth using the GRASP algorithm.

This study evaluates the potential of using aerosol optical depth ( ) measurements to characterise the microphysical and optical properties of atmospheric aerosols. With this aim, we used the recently developed GRASP (Generalized Retrieval of Aerosol and Surface Properties) code for numerical testing of six different aerosol models with different aerosol loads. The direct numerical simulations (self-consistency tests) indicate that the GRASP-AOD retrieval provides modal aerosol optical depths (fine and coarse) to within 0.

Retrievals of aerosol optical and microphysical properties from Imaging Polar Nephelometer scattering measurements.

A method for the retrieval of aerosol optical and microphysical properties from in situ light-scattering measurements is presented and the results are compared with existing measurement techniques. The Generalized Retrieval of Aerosol and Surface Properties (GRASP) is applied to airborne and laboratory measurements made by a novel polar nephelometer. This instrument, the Polarized Imaging Nephelometer (PI-Neph), is capable of making high-accuracy field measurements of phase function and degree of linear polarization, at three visible wavelengths, over a wide angular range of 3 to 177°.

Improved technique for data inversion: optical sizing of multicomponent aerosols.

Estimation of particle-size distribution is analyzed for the complicated case of compound aerosols, in which particles are distinguished by sizes and optical constants. This task arises in a number of interesting practical situations when aerosol scatterers cannot be described with a common refractive index. This is an inverse problem with a large number of variables, and questions of formal inversion are of great importance here.