Intercomparison of aerosol physical and physical properties derived from surface radiometers and in-situ aircraft profiles over six Maryland sites during the DRAGON and DISCOVER-AQ campaign
Abstract
The Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) project and international collaborators deployed more than 40 Cimel sunphotometers in the Baltimore-Washington, DC region for the summer 2011 DRAGON-USA (Distributed Regional Aerosol Gridded Observational Network) campaign. This unprecedented mesoscale network was comprised of automatic sun/sky radiometers distributed with roughly 10km grid spacing (covering an area of ~60km x 120km) which operated continuously for more than two months. The DRAGON-USA campaign was concurrent with the NASA sponsored DISCOVER-AQ air quality experiment which performed 14 days of research flights in July concentrating on repeated multiple daily profile measurements of gaseous and particulate pollution over 6 primary sun photometer sites. Atmospheric conditions varied from clean and dry to extremely hazy and humid on flight days with corresponding aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 500 nm ranging from ~0.06 to ~0.90 and precipitable water (PW) ranging from ~1.5 cm to ~4.5 cm. In-situ aerosol properties were measured on the NASA P-3B by the NASA Langley Aerosol Group Experiment (LARGE) team using a suite of instruments to characterize ambient aerosol optical and microphysical properties. Size distributions were made with a custom scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS), an Ultrahigh Sensitivity Aerosol Spectrometer (UHSAS) from Droplet Measurement Technologies, and Aerosol Particle Sizer (APS) from TSI. Aerosol optical measurements were made with a TSI-3563 3-wavelength integrating nephelometer and a 3-wavelength Radiance Research Particle Soot Absorption Photometer (PSAP). We present preliminary comparisons of coincident single scattering albedo (at three wavelengths) and column integrated size distributions retrieved from the surface Cimel sunphotometer almucantar sky radiances and from aircraft in-situ observations during flight profiles at key sites.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.A11H0189S
- Keywords:
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- 0305 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Aerosols and particles;
- 0360 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Radiation: transmission and scattering