K. Folkert Boersma

An aerosol boomerang: Rapid around‐the‐world transport of smoke from the December 2006 Australian forest fires observed from space

[1]xa0We investigate rapid around-the-world transport of a smoke aerosol plume released by intense forest fires in southeastern Australia in December 2006. During the first half of December 2006, southeastern Australia suffered from severe drought and exceptionally high temperatures. On 14 December 2006, a passing cold front in combination with the intense heat from the fires causing pyro-convective lofting, injected a large mass of aerosol particles into the jet stream. We track the resulting aerosol plume using Aerosol Absorbing Index (AAI) observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and find that it circumnavigated the world in 12 days. Using observations from OMI and the CALIOP (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) spaceborne lidar, we show that the plume resided in the high troposphere at different stages of its evolution. In absence of CALIOP data, we explored OMI O2-O2 pressures to obtain information on the aerosol plume height. Detailed radiative transfer calculations suggest that the current OMI O2-O2 retrievals contain useful information on the altitude of the aerosol plume under specific conditions (high AAI, no clouds below). The observed two-dimensional evolution of the smoke aerosol plume and the vertical distribution of the plume detected by CALIOP is matched by simulations with the TM4 chemistry transport model for an injection height of 248 hPa (∼10 km). Injection heights at the surface and at 540 hPa (∼5 km) resulted in simulated vertical distributions that were 2–3 km too low relative to CALIOP observations and showed less agreement with the AAI patterns. The high injection altitude of 10 km mimics the effect of pyro-convective lofting as the additional buoyancy from the intense fires is not accounted for in the model. TM4 simulations with an inert and a water-soluble tracer reproduce the observed dilution of the plume and show that the latter gives the best agreement with the observations, suggesting that the ultimate removal of the aerosol particles is by scavenging. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed study of around-the-world long-range transport of forest fire emissions in the extratropical Southern Hemisphere.

Testing and improving OMI DOMINO tropospheric NO2 using observations from the DANDELIONS and INTEX‐B validation campaigns

We present a sensitivity analysis of the tropospheric NO2 retrieval from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) using measurements from the Dutch Aerosol and Nitrogen Dioxide Experiments for Validation of OMI and SCIAMACHY (DANDELIONS) and Intercontinental Chemical Transport Experiment-B (INTEX-B) campaigns held in 2006. These unique campaigns covered a wide range of pollution conditions and provided detailed information on the vertical distribution of NO2. During the DANDELIONS campaign, tropospheric NO2 profiles were measured with a lidar in a highly polluted region of the Netherlands. During the INTEX-B campaign, NO2 profiles were measured using laser-induced fluorescence onboard an aircraft in a range of meteorological and polluted conditions over the Gulf of Mexico and the east Pacific. We present a comparison of measured profiles with a priori profiles used in the OMI tropospheric NO2 retrieval algorithm. We examine how improvements in surface albedo estimates improve the OMI NO2 retrieval. From these comparisons we find that the absolute average change in tropospheric columns retrieved with measured profiles and improved surface albedos is 23% with a standard deviation of 27% and no trend in the improved being larger or smaller than the original. We show that these changes occur in case studies related to pollution in the southeastern United States and pollution outflow in the Gulf of Mexico. We also examine the effects of using improved Mexico City terrain heights on the OMI NO2 product.