Journal article
Constraining Aerosol Phase Function Using Dual‐View Geostationary Satellites
Journal of geophysical research. Atmospheres, Vol.126(20), e2021JD035209
10/27/2021
DOI: 10.1029/2021JD035209
Abstract
Passive satellite observations play an important role in monitoring global aerosol properties and helping quantify aerosol radiative forcing in the climate system. The quality of aerosol retrievals from the satellite platform relies on well‐calibrated radiance measurements from multiple spectral bands, and the availability of appropriate particle optical models. Inaccurate scattering phase function assumptions can introduce large retrieval errors. The high‐spatial resolution, dual‐view observations from the advanced baseline imagers onboard the two most recent geostationary operational environmental satellites (GOES), East and West, provide a unique opportunity to better constrain the aerosol phase function. Using dual GOES reflectance measurements for a dust event in the Gulf of Mexico in 2019, we demonstrate how a first‐guess phase function can be reconstructed by considering the variations in observed scattering angles throughout the day. Using the reconstructed phase function, aerosol optical depth retrievals from the two satellites are self‐consistent and agree well with surface‐based optical depth estimates. We evaluate our methodology and reconstructed phase function against independent retrievals made from low‐Earth‐orbit multi‐angle observations for a different dust event in 2020. Our new aerosol optical depth retrievals have a root‐mean‐square‐difference of 0.019–0.047. Furthermore, the retrievals between the two geostationary satellites for this case agree within about 0.059 ± 0.072, as compared to larger discrepancies between the operational GOES products at times, which do not employ the dual‐view technique.
Key Points
Dual, opposing‐view geostationary satellite observations help constrain structural properties of dust scattering phase function
The newly reconstructed phase function produces consistent aerosol optical depth retrievals between the two satellites
The retrievals between the two satellites agree within 0.059 ± 0.072, compared to 0.157 ± 0.084 in single view retrievals
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Constraining Aerosol Phase Function Using Dual‐View Geostationary Satellites
- Creators
- Qijing Bian - Colorado State UniversitySonia Kreidenweis - Colorado State UniversityJ. Christine Chiu - Colorado State UniversitySteven D Miller - Colorado State UniversityXiaoguang Xu - University of Maryland, BaltimoreJun Wang - University of IowaRalph A Kahn - Goddard Space Flight CenterJames A Limbacher - Goddard Space Flight CenterLorraine A Remer - University of Maryland, BaltimoreRobert C Levy - Goddard Space Flight Center
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of geophysical research. Atmospheres, Vol.126(20), e2021JD035209
- DOI
- 10.1029/2021JD035209
- ISSN
- 2169-897X
- eISSN
- 2169-8996
- Number of pages
- 16
- Grant note
- University of Iowa Atmospheric Composition Program U.S. Office of Naval Research (N00014‐16‐1‐2040) EOS Terra and MISR projects NASA (NNH17ZDA001N‐MEASURES) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 10/27/2021
- Academic Unit
- Civil and Environmental Engineering; Iowa Technology Institute; Physics and Astronomy; Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
- Record Identifier
- 9984186940602771
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