PNNL

Abstract

Aerosol columnar size distributions (SDs) are commonly provided by aerosol inversions based on measurements of both spectral extinction and sky radiance. These inversions developed for a fully clear sky offer few SDs for areas with abundant clouds. Here, we estimate SDs from spectral extinction data alone for cloudy coastal and maritime regions using aerosol refractive index (RI) obtained from chemical composition data. Our estimation involves finding volume and mean radius of lognormally distributed modes of an assumed bimodal size distribution through fitting of the spectral extinction data. We demonstrate that vertically integrated SDs obtained from aircraft measurements over a coastal site have distinct seasonal changes, and these changes are captured reasonably well by the estimated columnar SDs. We also demonstrate that similar seasonal changes occur at a maritime site, and columnar SDs retrieved from the combined extinction and sky radiance measurements are approximated quite well by their extinction only counterparts (correlation exceeds 0.9) during a 7-year period (2013–2019). The level of agreement between the estimated and retrieved SDs depends weakly on wavelength selection within a given spectral interval (roughly 0.4–1 µm). Since the extinction-based estimations can be performed frequently for partly cloudy skies, the number of periods where SDs can be found is greatly increased.