What is it about?
The ability of aerosol to uptake water has important impacts on understanding Earth's climate budget. Looking at this effect with lidar has a number of benefits. Lidar is a remote sensing system that can profile the atmosphere much more efficiently than laboratory based methods. Specifically, it can observe aerosol properties throughout the vertical column rather than at one point on the ground. This paper looks at the ability for lidar to make these water-uptake retrievals.
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Why is it important?
The results in this paper are an important step for understanding how implementing lidar systems capable of these measurements, and covering large spatial and temporal domains (for example, in space), will significantly improve our assessments of climate.
Perspectives
My hope is that this paper provides some fire to the decision-makers to implement this technology in space. We have the tools ready to bring new chemically-resolved aerosol measurements to our climate modeling community which will help them to significantly improve the estimates of climate forcing and overall, climate change.
Dr Kyle W Dawson
North Carolina State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ambient Aerosol Hygroscopic Growth From Combined Raman Lidar and HSRL, Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, April 2020, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1029/2019jd031708.
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