Vertical distribution of atmospheric aerosol size distribution over south-central New Mexico

Airborne measurements of aerosol extinction in the lower and middle troposphere over Wyoming, USA

“…Bimodal size distributions adequately describe observed SWYVIS size distributions, and display slight broadening of the coarse mode with increasing altitude. In the accumulation mode, median particle diameters and geometric standard deviations (Tables 4 and 5) are very similar to those reported by Kim et al (1993a) and Pinnick et al (1993). For the coarse mode, however, both inter-and intrastudy comparisons of the diameters show slightly more variability, though modal standard deviations are comparable.…”

“…Examples in the marine environment include NARE-96 (Cowling et al, 1998), ACE-1 (Bates et al, 1998), ACE-2 (Collins et al, 2000a;, and INDOEX (de Reuss et al, 2001). Over coastal and continental locations, following earlier work of Rosen et al (1992), Kim et al (1993a), Gunter et al (1993), Pinnick et al (1993) and Gunter (1994), more elaborate airborne data sets have been acquired in the Arctic (Hegg et al, 1996), in the US mid-Atlantic coastal region (Hegg et al, 1997;Hartley et al, 2000), and over the Los Angeles Basin (Collins et al, 2000b), among others.…”

“…However, while satellite instruments offer the advantage of extended coverage in time and space, calibration of the retrieval products is still necessary and ideally requires three-dimensional in situ measurements for appropriate comparisons. Aircraft observations afford the principal advantage of yielding detailed information on aerosol properties with height, albeit within short time periods over geographic areas of limited extent, thereby enabling the question of inhomogeneities of aerosol properties in the vertical to be addressed (Kim et al, 1993a;Pinnick et al, 1993;Raga and Jonas, 1995;Clarke et al, 1996;Sheridan and Ogren, 1999). Airborne observations that are sufficiently comprehensive to inter-relate the optical, physical, and chemical properties of particulates have been carried out relatively infrequently.…”

Comparison of Aerosol Properties Within and Above the ABL at the ARM Program's SGP Site

“…Many previous studies (for example Kim et al 1993, Ahonen et al 1997, Zelenka 1997 show that the vertical profiles of aerosol extensive properties are significantly affected by the depth of the ML. These studies have shown that a low MH leads to high particle concentrations near the surface, while a larger MH results in lower concentrations near the surface.…”

Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Aerosol

“…In particular, a three-wavelength (0.449, 0.536, and 0.690 μm) nephelometer and an aethalometer were used during the four aforementioned field periods to assess the effects of aerosol scattering and absorption on shortwave radiation and define the vertical features of particulate extinction. The aerosol vertical profiles and size-distribution features were investigated by Kim et al (1993) using the airborne nephelometer, aethalometer, Forward-Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP), and Active-Scattering Aerosol Spectrometer Probe (ASASP), the last two instruments being mounted on the wings of the NOAA King Air research aircraft. The vertical distribution profiles of background atmospheric aerosols were determined over the 0.2 ≤ z ≤ 4.5 km altitude range, showing bimodal features typical of the continental atmospheric aerosols over the whole 0.1 ≤ a ≤ 32 μm size range, therefore including both fine and coarse particle modes, whose average aerosol size-distribution curves were well approximated by lognormal curves.…”