A long term record of aerosol absorption from TOMS observations

The discovery of the TOMS capability to detect the presence of absorbing aerosols made possible, for the first time in the history of aerosol sensing from space, the observation of the spatial and temporal variability of carbonaceous and mineral aerosols, over the oceans and the continents. In spite of its qualitative nature, the TOMS aerosol index has been found to be a very useful tool in a variety of applications. In addition to the Aerosol Index product, an inversion procedure was developed to transform the information content of the aerosol index into physically meaningful aerosol parameters: aerosol optical depth and single scattering albedo. Thus, the long term record (1979-1993, 1996-present) of TOMS near UV observations has been used to produce the only global data set on aerosol absorption. The TOMS global climatological record of aerosol absorption optical will be presented and discussed. The results presented here constitute the first long-term nearly global climatological record of aerosol absorption optical depth over both land and water surfaces over regions and times (1979 to present) where ground-based observations are not available.