HR: 10:35h
AN: A52A-02 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Satellite Monitoring of Long-Range Transport of Asian Dust Storms from Sources to Sinks
AU: * Hsu, N
EM: hsu@climate.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA/GSFC, Earth-Sun Exploration Division, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Tsay, S
EM: tsay@climate.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA/GSFC, Earth-Sun Exploration Division, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Jeong, M
EM: mjeong@climate.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA/GSFC, Earth-Sun Exploration Division, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: King, M
EM: michael.d.king@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA/GSFC, Earth-Sun Exploration Division, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Holben, B
EM: brent@aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA/GSFC, Earth-Sun Exploration Division, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AB: Among the many components that contribute to air pollution, airborne mineral dust plays an important role due to its biogeochemical impact on the ecosystem and its radiative-forcing effect on the climate system. In East Asia, dust storms frequently accompany the cold and dry air masses that occur as part of spring-time cold front systems. China's capital, Beijing, and other large cities are on the primary pathway of these dust storm plumes, and their passage over such popu-lation centers causes flight delays, pushes grit through windows and doors, and forces people indoors. Furthermore, during the spring these anthropogenic and natural air pollutants, once generated over the source regions, can be transported out of the boundary layer into the free troposphere and can travel thousands of kilometers across the Pacific into the United States and beyond. In this paper, we will demonstrate the capability of a new satellite algorithm to retrieve aerosol optical thickness and single scattering albedo over bright-reflecting surfaces such as urban areas and deserts. Such retrievals have been dif-ficult to perform using previously available algorithms that use wavelengths from the mid-visible to the near IR because they have trouble separating the aerosol signal from the contribution due to the bright surface reflectance. The new algorithm, called Deep Blue, utilizes blue-wavelength measurements from instruments such as SeaWiFS and MODIS to infer the properties of aerosols, since the surface reflectance over land in the blue part of the spectrum is much lower than for longer wavelength channels. Deep Blue algorithm has recently been integrated into the MODIS processing stream and began to provide aerosol products over land as part of the opera-tional MYD04 products. In this talk, we will show the comparisons of the MODIS Deep Blue products with data from AERONET sunphotometers on a global ba-sis. The results indicate reasonable agreements between these two. These new satellite products will allow scientists to determine quantitatively the aerosol properties near sources and their evolution along transport pathway using high spatial resolution measurements from SeaWiFS and MODIS-like instruments. We will also utilize the multiyear satellite measurements from MODIS and SeaWiFS to investigate the interannual variability of source strength, pathway, and radia-tive forcing associated with these dust outbreaks in East Asia.
DE: 0305 Aerosols and particles (0345, 4801, 4906)
DE: 0322 Constituent sources and sinks
DE: 0345 Pollution: urban and regional (0305, 0478, 4251)
DE: 0360 Radiation: transmission and scattering
DE: 3360 Remote sensing
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly