Applying Satellite Retrievals to Study Processes: How Tropical Convection Influences the Saharan Dust Layer
Abstract
Aerosols modulate the Earth's climate through both direct interactions with radiation and indirectly by modifying cloud albedo and lifetime. Understanding the processes that govern aerosol distributions requires accurate, collocated aerosol, cloud, and precipitation retrievals as well as new analysis methods that explicitly include a temporal dimension. Collectively, the active and passive sensors in the A-Train constellation provide an unprecedented dataset for examining complex aerosol-precipitation interactions especially when placed in the context of time-evolving cloud information from geostationary satellites. This presentation sets the stage for discussing recent advances in satellite-based aerosol, cloud, and precipitation property retrievals by outlining a new approach for leveraging such datasets to study atmospheric processes. We focus on the problem of quantifying how convection modulates the distribution of aerosols within the atmosphere. By examining the evolution of snapshots from A-Train sensors, it will be shown that the concentration and vertical distribution of Saharan dust are strongly modulated by storms over the tropical Atlantic. Further compositing polar-orbiting satellite observations according to time-resolved observations from geostationary satellites yields quantitative estimates of the amount of dust that is scavenged and lofted by tropical convection. These results demonstrate the value of improved aerosol, cloud, and precipitation property retrievals for not only documenting their spatial and temporal distributions but also untangling the processes that govern their interactions in the climate system.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMA158...01L
- Keywords:
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- 3311 Clouds and aerosols;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 3354 Precipitation;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 3360 Remote sensing;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES