Recent Progress in Aerosol Remote Sensing and Products

Dear Colleagues,

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, aerosol radiative forcing contributes the largest uncertainty to total radiative forcing estimates. Sources of uncertainty include variability in spatial and temporal distributions of aerosols and interactions between aerosols and clouds. Remote sensing from a multitude of platforms including satellites, aircraft, ships, and ground-based stations has become widespread, greatly increasing the ability to characterize regional and global scale aerosol emissions and distributions. These observations have also been employed to further the understanding of impacts of aerosols on clouds and vice versa.

This Topics project aims to review current uses of remote sensing to improve our present understanding of aerosol emissions, distributions, impacts on clouds and climate, and removal processes. Contributions related to any of these aspects of remote sensing along with developments of novel remote sensing applications and products and their use in modeling aerosol distributions and impacts are welcome.

This multidisciplinary topic will be dedicated to the presentation of scientific papers that can be collected under the common title “Recent Progress in Aerosol Remote Sensing and Products”.

We welcome submissions that include, but are not limited to the following topics:

• Aerosol emissions, transport, removal, and vertical profiles
• Remote sensing
• Measurement methods
• Radiative forcing
• Aerosol – cloud interactions
• Satellite, aircraft, ship, and land-based observations

Dr. Patricia K. Quinn
Prof. Dr. Maria João Costa
Dr. Oleg Dubovik
Prof. Dr. Jean-Christophe Raut
Topic Editors