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Atmosphere
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Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation Processes and Interactions Observed with Ground-Based Remote...
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Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation Processes and Interactions Observed with Ground-Based Remote Sensing Measurements

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Aerosols".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 July 2021) | Viewed by 11054

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Damao Zhang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99354, USA
Interests: cloud; aerosol; remote sensing; satellite; Lidar
Dr. Adeyemi Adebiyi

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences, University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
Interests: desert dust; biomass-burning aerosols; aerosol-cloud interactions; aerosol-meteorology interactions; air pollution transport; aerosol radioactive effects
Prof. Dr. Jean-Christophe Raut

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
LATMOS-IPSL, Sorbonne Université (UPMC), UVSQ, CNRS/INSU, 75006 Paris, France
Interests: aerosols; Arctic region; aerosol-cloud interactions; mesoscale modeling; atmospheric remote sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Atmospheric aerosol, cloud, and precipitation processes are among the most important factors that regulate Earth’s radiation budget, hydrological cycle, and climate change. The spatial scales of these processes range from micrometers to thousands of kilometers and the temporal scales range from seconds to several days, which brings great challenges for Earth system model simulations and future projections. To make it more complicated, these processes have a complex web of interactions and many of them are not well understood. Ground-based passive and active remote sensing instruments have been widely developed and greatly improved over the past several decades. They can provide measurements of atmospheric processes with high spatial and temporal resolutions. Especially, the synergy of different active and passive remote sensing instruments provides opportunities for advanced retrievals of aerosol, cloud, radiation and precipitation properties. In addition, scanning remote sensing instruments provide 4-dimension observations that can be used to study the evolution of these atmospheric processes.

This special issue calls for papers focusing on aerosol, cloud, radiation and precipitation processes and interactions observed with ground-based remote sensing measurements. Original research studies on aerosol, cloud, precipitation processes and their interactions, retrieval algorithm developments, improvements, and model improvements and validations against observations, as well as review papers are all encouraged. Original results and review papers about the synergy of active and passive remote sensing instruments and scanning remote sensing measurements are especially welcomed. 

Dr. Damao Zhang
Dr. Adeyemi Adebiyi
Prof. Dr. Jean-Christophe Raut
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Atmosphere is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • aerosol processes
  • cloud processes
  • precipitation processes
  • aerosol-cloud-radiation-precipitation interactions
  • remote sensing

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 1739 KiB  
Article
Estimation of Aerosol Columnar Size Distribution from Spectral Extinction Data in Coastal and Maritime Environment
by Evgueni Kassianov, Mikhail Pekour, James Barnard, Connor J. Flynn, Fan Mei and Larry K. Berg
Atmosphere 2021, 12(11), 1412; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12111412 - 27 Oct 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1598
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 [...] Read more.
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. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation Processes and Interactions Observed with Ground-Based Remote Sensing Measurements)
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13 pages, 21819 KiB  
Article
Characteristics of Desert Precipitation in the UAE Derived from a Ceilometer Dataset
by Martin W. Airey, Keri A. Nicoll, R. Giles Harrison and Graeme J. Marlton
Atmosphere 2021, 12(10), 1245; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12101245 - 24 Sep 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2740
Abstract
Understanding rainfall in arid and water-scarce regions is central to the efficient use of water resources in agriculture, irrigation, and domestic food security. This work presents a new dataset with which to study precipitation processes in arid regions, utilising two years (2018–2020) of [...] Read more.
Understanding rainfall in arid and water-scarce regions is central to the efficient use of water resources in agriculture, irrigation, and domestic food security. This work presents a new dataset with which to study precipitation processes in arid regions, utilising two years (2018–2020) of ceilometer observations made at Al Ain International Airport in the desert region of Al Ain, United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the annual rainfall is 76 mm. Ceilometer data provide a novel method by which to study both the evolution of water droplets from the cloud base down to the surface and the local circumstances required for rain to successfully reach the surface. In this work, we explore how successful precipitation depends on the initial size of the droplets and the thermodynamic profile below the cloud. For 64 of the 105 rain events, the droplet diameters ranged from 0.60 to 3.75 mm, with a mean of 1.84 mm. We find that smaller droplets, higher cloud bases, reduced cloud depths, and colder cloud bases all act to prevent successful precipitation, instead yielding virga (28 out of the 105 rain generating events). We identify how these multiple regional factors combine—specifically, we identify clouds deeper than 2.9 km, droplet diameters greater than 2 mm, and a midpoint below-cloud RH profile greater than 50%—to give successful rainfall, which may ultimately lead to more efficient rainfall enhancing measures, such as cloud seeding. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation Processes and Interactions Observed with Ground-Based Remote Sensing Measurements)
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21 pages, 10454 KiB  
Article
Retrieval of Aerosol Optical Thickness with Custom Aerosol Model Using SKYNET Data over the Chiba Area
by Zixuan Xue, Hiroaki Kuze and Hitoshi Irie
Atmosphere 2021, 12(9), 1144; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12091144 - 05 Sep 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3272
Abstract
The retrieval of the aerosol optical thickness (AOT) from remotely-sensed data relies on the adopted aerosol model. However, the method of this technique has been rather limited because of the high variability of the surface albedo, in addition to the spatial variability in [...] Read more.
The retrieval of the aerosol optical thickness (AOT) from remotely-sensed data relies on the adopted aerosol model. However, the method of this technique has been rather limited because of the high variability of the surface albedo, in addition to the spatial variability in the aerosol properties over the land surfaces. To overcome unsolved problems, we proposed a method for the visibility-derived AOT estimation from SKYNET-based measurement and daytime satellite images with a custom aerosol model over the Chiba area (35.62° N, 140.10° E), which is located in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area in Japan. Different from conventionally-used aerosol models for the boundary layer, we created a custom aerosol model by using sky-radiometer observation data of aerosol volume size distribution and refractive indices, coupled with spectral response functions (SPFs) of satellite visible bands to alleviate the wide range of path-scattered radiance. We utilized the radiative transfer code 6S to implement the radiative transfer calculation based on the created custom aerosol model. The concurrent data from ground-based measurement are used in the radiative analysis, namely the temporal variation of AOT from SKYNET. The radiative estimation conducted under clear-sky conditions with minimum aerosol loading is used for the determination of the surface albedo, so that the 6S simulation yields a well-defined relation between total radiance and surface albedo. We made look-up tables (LUTs) pixel-by-pixel over the Chiba area for the custom aerosol model to retrieve the satellite AOT distribution based on the surface albedo. Therefore, such a reference of surface albedo generated from clear-sky conditions, in turn, can be employed to retrieve the spatial distribution of AOT on both clear and relatively turbid days. The value for the AOTs retrieved using the custom aerosol model is found to be stable than conventionally-used typical aerosol models, indicating that our method yields substantially better performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation Processes and Interactions Observed with Ground-Based Remote Sensing Measurements)
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17 pages, 6574 KiB  
Article
Observations of Atmospheric Aerosol and Cloud Using a Polarized Micropulse Lidar in Xi’an, China
by Chao Chen, Xiaoquan Song, Zhangjun Wang, Wenyan Wang, Xiufen Wang, Quanfeng Zhuang, Xiaoyan Liu, Hui Li, Kuntai Ma, Xianxin Li, Xin Pan, Feng Zhang, Boyang Xue and Yang Yu
Atmosphere 2021, 12(6), 796; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12060796 - 21 Jun 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2100
Abstract
A polarized micropulse lidar (P-MPL) employing a pulsed laser at 532 nm was developed by the Institute of Oceanographic Instrumentation, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences). The optomechanical structure, technical parameters, detection principle, overlap factor calculation method, and inversion methods of [...] Read more.
A polarized micropulse lidar (P-MPL) employing a pulsed laser at 532 nm was developed by the Institute of Oceanographic Instrumentation, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences). The optomechanical structure, technical parameters, detection principle, overlap factor calculation method, and inversion methods of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) depth and depolarization ratio (DR) were introduced. Continuous observations using the P-MPL were carried out at Xi’an Meteorological Bureau, and the observation data were analyzed. In this study, we gleaned much information on aerosols and clouds, including the temporal and spatial variation of aerosols and clouds, aerosol extinction coefficient, DR, and the structure of ABL were obtained by the P-MPL. The variation of aerosols and clouds before and after a short rainfall was analyzed by combining time-height-indication (THI) of range corrected signal (RCS) and DR was obtained by the P-MPL with profiles of potential temperature (PT) and relative humidity (RH) detected by GTS1 Digital Radiosonde. Then, the characteristics of tropopause cirrus cloud were discussed using the data of DR, PT, and RH. Finally, a haze process from January 1st to January 5th was studied by using aerosol extinction coefficients obtained by the P-MPL, PT, and RH profiles measured by GTS1 Digital Radiosonde and the time-varying of PM2.5 and PM10 observed by ambient air quality monitor. The source of the haze was simulated by using the NOAA HYSPLIT Trajectory Model. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation Processes and Interactions Observed with Ground-Based Remote Sensing Measurements)
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