Effective Lidar Ratios of Dense Dust Aerosol Layers over North Africa Observed by the CALIPSO Lidar

The Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite, a joint US and French mission, was launched three years ago to provide new insight into the role that clouds and aerosols play in regulating Earth's weather, climate, and air quality. A key instrument on board the CALIPSO payload is a two-wavelength, polarization-sensitive backscatter lidar. With its capabilities of depolarization ratio measurement and high resolution profiling, the CALIPSO lidar provides a unique opportunity to study the dust aerosol globally. Currently, a cloud and aerosol discrimination (CAD) algorithm that incorporates five-dimensional probability distribution function (5D-PDF) is being developed for implementation in future data releases. This new 5D-PDF approach allows nearly unambiguous identification of dense dust layers over/near their source regions and therefore enables the study of these layers using a large amount of the CALIPSO data. Lidar ratio (i.e., extinction-to-backscatter ratio) is an intrinsic optical property of aerosols and a key parameter necessary in the lidar signal inversion to retrieve profiles of aerosol extinction and backscatter coefficients, which are two primary products of the CALIPSO level 2 data. This parameter is usually selected in the CALIPSO lidar level 2 data processing based on the aerosol type identified. (Six types of aerosols have been modeled: dust, polluted dust, marine, continental, polluted continental, and smoke.) As more data is being collected by the CALIPSO lidar, validation studies with the CALIPSO measurements are being performed and are now becoming available. For opaque dust layers, the effective lidar ratio (the product of lidar ratio and multiple scattering factor) can be determined easily from integrated attenuated backscatter over the layer top and apparent base. We have performed an extensive analysis based on the first two and a half years (June 2006 - December 2008) of the CALIPSO lidar nighttime measurement data with the 5D-PDF CAD algorithm applied. The effective lidar ratios computed for the opaque dust layers over the North Africa (12N-30N), one of the largest source regions in the world, have a relatively broad distribution, with a mean/median value of 38.5/36.4 sr at 532 nm and 50.3/47.7 sr at 1064 nm. The experimentally determined values are in good agreement with the modeling results for Saharan dust aerosols. Monte-Carlo simulations have also been performed to examine the impact of multiple scattering. The results show that multiple scattering generally has a small impact on the effective lidar (multiple scattering factor at the layer base > 0.9). However, when the dust extinction is > ~ 2/km, the multiple scattering impact can increase significantly. A closer examination of the depolarization ratio profiles in the dense dust layers shows a general agreement with the multiple scattering simulations.