Sergey Khaykin

Stratospheric Smoke With Unprecedentedly High Backscatter Observed by Lidars Above Southern France

Extreme pyro-convection events triggered by wildfires in northwest Canada and U.S. during August 2017 resulted in vast injection of combustion products into the stratosphere. The plumes of stratospheric smoke were observed by lidars at Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP) for many weeks that followed the fires as distinct aerosol layers with backscatter reaching unprecedentedly high values for a non-volcanic aerosol layer. We use space-borne CALIPSO lidar to track the spatiotemporal evolution of the smoke plumes before their detection at OHP. A remarkable agreement between ground- and spaced-based lidars sampling the same smoke plume on a particular date allowed us to extrapolate the OHP observations to a regional scale, where CALIPSO reported extreme AOD values as high as 0.21. On a monthly time scale, the lidar observations indicate that boreal summer 2017 forest fires had a hemisphere-scale impact on stratospheric aerosol load, similar to that of moderate volcanic eruptions.

Postmillennium changes in stratospheric temperature consistently resolved by GPS radio occultation and AMSU observations

Temperature changes in the lower and middle stratosphere during 2001-2016 are evaluated using measurements from GPS Radio Occultation (RO) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) aboard the Aqua satellite. After downsampling of GPS-RO profiles according to the AMSU weighting functions, the spatially and seasonally resolved trends from the two data sets are in excellent agreement. The observations indicate that the middle stratosphere has cooled in the time period 2002-2016 at an average rate of –0.14±0.12 to –0.36±0.14 K/decade, while no significant change was found in the lower stratosphere. The meridionally and vertically resolved trends from high-resolution GPS-RO data exhibit a marked inter-hemispheric asymmetry and highlight a distinct boundary between tropospheric and stratospheric temperature change regimes matching the tropical thermal tropopause. The seasonal pattern of trend reveals significant opposite-sign structures at high and low latitudes, providing indication of seasonally varying change in stratospheric circulation.

Ice particle sampling from aircraft - influence of the probing position on the ice water content

The ice water content (IWC) of cirrus clouds is an essential parameter determining their radiative properties and thus is important for climate simulations. Therefore, for a reliable measurement of IWC on board of research aircraft, it is important to carefully design the ice crystal sampling and measuring devices. During the HALO field campaign ML-CIRRUS in 2014, IWC was recorded by three closed path total water together with one gas phase water instrument. The hygrometers were supplied by inlets mounted on the roof of the aircraft fuselage. Simultaneously, the IWC is determined by a cloud 5 particle spectrometer attached under an aircraft wing. Two more examples of simultaneous IWC measurements by hygrometers and cloud spectrometers are presented, but the inlets of the hygrometers were mounted at the fuselage side (Geophysica, StratoClim campaign 2017) and bottom (WB57, MacPex 2011). This combination of instruments and inlet positions provides the opportunity to experimentally study the influence of the ice particle sampling position on the IWC. As expected from theoretical considerations, we found that the IWCs provided by the roof inlets deviate from those measured under the aircraft 10 wing. Caused by the inlet position in the shadow-zone behind the aircraft cockpit, ice particles populations with mean mass sizes larger than about 25 μm radius are subject to losses, which lead to strongly underestimated IWCs. On the other hand, cloud populations with mean mass sizes smaller than about 12 μm are dominated by particle enrichment and thus overestimated IWCs. In the range of mean mass sizes between 12 and 25μm, both enrichment and losses of ice crystal can occur, depending on whether the ice crystal mass peak of the in these cases bimodal size distribution is on the smaller or larger mass mode. 15 The resulting deviations of the IWC reach factors of up to 10 or even more for losses as well as for enrichment. Since the mean mass size of ice crystals increases with temperature, losses are more pronounced at higher temperatures while at lower temperatures IWC is more affected by enrichment. In contrast, in the cases where the hygrometer inlets were mounted at the fuselage side or bottom, the agreement of IWCs is -due to undisturbed ice particle sampling, as expected from theorymost frequently within a factor of 2.5, independently of the mean ice crystal sizes. Summarizing, in case IWC needs to be detected 20 1 Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2017-373 Manuscript under review for journal Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discussion started: 17 October 2017 c

Modeling the TTL at Continental Scale for a Wet Season: An Evaluation of the BRAMS Mesoscale Model Using TRO‐Pico Campaign, and Measurements From Airborne and Spaceborne Sensors

In order to better understand the water vapor (WV) intrusion into the tropical stratosphere, a mesoscale simulation of the tropical tropopause layer (TTL) using the BRAMS (Brazilian version of RAMS) model is evaluated for a wet season. This simulation with a horizontal grid-point resolution of 20 km × 20 km cannot resolve the stratospheric overshooting convection (SOC). Its ability to reproduce other key parameters playing a role in the stratospheric WV abundance is investigated using the balloon-borne TRO-Pico campaign measurements, the upper-air soundings over Brazil, and the satellite observations by Aura MLS (Microwave Limb Sounder), MHS (Microwave Humidity Sounder) and GOES-12. The BRAMS exhibits a good ability in simulating temperature, cold-point, WV variability around the tropopause. However, the simulation is typically observed to be warmer by ∼2.0°C and wetter by ∼0.4 ppmv at the hygropause, which can be partly affiliated with the grid-boundary nudging of the model by ECMWF operational analyses. The modeled cloud tops show a good correlation (maximum cross-correlation of ∼0.7) with GOES-12. Furthermore, the overshooting cells detected by MHS are observed at the locations, where 75% of the modeled cloud tops are higher than 11 km. Finally, the modeled inertia-gravity wave periodicity and wavelength are comparable with those deduced from the radio sounding measurements during TRO-Pico campaign. The good behavior of BRAMS confirms the SOC contribution in the WV abundance and variability is of lesser importance than the large-scale processes. This simulation can be used as a reference run for upscaling the impact of SOC at a continental scale for future studies.

Lidar temperature series in the middle atmosphere as a reference data set. Part A: Improved retrievals and a 20 year cross-validation of two co-located Frenchlidars

The objective of this paper and its companion (Wing et al., 2018) is to show that ground-based lidar temperatures are a stable, accurate, and precise data set for use in validating satellite temperatures at high vertical resolution. Long-term lidar observations of the middle atmosphere have been conducted at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP), located in southern France (43.93 N, 5.71 E), since 1978. Making use of 20 years of high-quality co-located lidar measurements, we have shown that lidar temperatures calculated using the Rayleigh technique at 532 nm are statistically identical to lidar temperatures calculated from the non-absorbing 355 nm channel of a differential absorption lidar (DIAL) system. This result is of interest to members of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) ozone lidar community seeking to produce validated temperature products. Additionally, we have addressed previously published concerns of lidar–satellite relative warm bias in comparisons of upper-mesospheric and lower-thermospheric (UMLT) temperature profiles. We detail a data treatment algorithm which minimizes known errors due to data selection procedures, a priori choices, and initialization parameters inherent in the lidar retrieval. Our algorithm results in a median cooling of the lidar-calculated absolute temperature profile by 20 K at 90 km altitude with respect to the standard OHP NDACC lidar temperature algorithm. The confidence engendered by the long-term crossvalidation of two independent lidars and the improved lidar temperature data set is exploited in Wing et al. (2018) for use in multi-year satellite validations.

Comparison and merging of ozone profile data from various measurement techniques at NDACC Alpine station

Within the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Changes (NDACC), various remote sensing techniques are used in addition to in situ ozone sounding measurements for the long-term evaluation of the ozone vertical distribution. These techniques, using e.g. microwave spectrometers, Fourier Transform Infrared spectrometers or laser radiation (lidars), are very different in terms of vertical distribution, time sampling and precision, which can present some difficulties for the validation of satellite data or the products of the European Monitoring atmospheric composition & climate Service (MACC). A methodology was developed for the integration of profile ozone data from various sources in order to provide consistent ozone vertical distribution time series as well as tropospheric and stratospheric ozone partial columns. This methodology was developed for measurements performed in the stations forming the Alpine station (e.g. Haute-Provence Observatory OHP – France, Bern – Switzerland, Jungfraujoch – Switzerland). Ozone measurements from the ozone DIAL lidar instrument and ozone sondes at OHP, the microwave spectrometer at Bern and the FTIR spectrometer at the Jungfraujoch station were used for this purpose.