David Nowicki - March 24

Weather and Climate Systems Seminar Information Content Analysis of Combined Lidar-Polarimeter Retrievals to Improve Aerosol Remote Sensing Accuracy David Nowicki Wednesday, March 24th 2:00 pm   Join Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/jdv-kpfr-gnu Aerosols are small particles suspended in the atmosphere that affect global climate change by scattering and absorbing light. Additionally, the

Start

March 24, 2021 - 2:00 pm

End

March 24, 2021 - 3:00 pm

Weather and Climate Systems Seminar

Information Content Analysis of Combined Lidar-Polarimeter Retrievals to Improve Aerosol Remote Sensing Accuracy

David Nowicki

Wednesday, March 24th

2:00 pm

 

Join Google Meet:

https://meet.google.com/jdv-kpfr-gnu

Aerosols are small particles suspended in the atmosphere that affect global climate change by scattering and absorbing light. Additionally, the prevalence of some toxic aerosols has a direct adverse impact on public health. At present, aerosols remain the greatest source of uncertainty for radiative forcing. Though characterization of spatially and temporally varying aerosols is difficult, the last half century has seen continuous improvement in aerosol remote sensing instrumentation as well as modeling accuracy and efficiency, which increase our ability to retrieve species-specific optical and microphysical aerosol properties. Two remote sensing techniques, polarimetric and lidar measurements, have complementary strengths of resolving column-effective and vertical distributions of aerosol properties, respectively. There is significant interest within the remote sensing community in (1) using collocated lidar and polarimeter systems on space-borne platforms and (2) developing more efficient, versatile models that can effectively use data produced by (1) to enhance aerosol remote sensing accuracy. To address (2), the information content analysis (ICA) model is adopted in this study. ICA uses a priori knowledge of aerosol properties and instrument accuracy as model input. Model output reveals the dependence of geophysical variable (GV) retrieval capabilities on these input data. We analyze results to (1) check whether aerosol GV uncertainty thresholds established by NASA’s ACCP mission are met by different lidar and polarimetric instrument configurations or combinations and (2) identify a cost-effective, accurate instrument combination for future missions. Preliminary results show clear impact of a priori knowledge on retrieval capabilities as well as the importance of specific measurements to accurate retrievals of the GVs considered.