Bremen 2017 – scientific programme
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UP: Fachverband Umweltphysik
UP 14: Atmosphäre - Aerosole/Wolken
UP 14.4: Talk
Thursday, March 16, 2017, 15:30–15:45, GW2 B3009
Desert dust outbreaks near West-Africa observed from space — •Abram Sanders1, Luca Lelli1, Pepijn Veefkind2, Johan De Haan2, Marco Vountas1, and John Burrows1 — 1Institut für Umweltphysik (IUP), Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany — 2Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI), De Bilt, Netherlands
The Saharan region is responsible for more than half of the global dust emissions and large amounts of dust are transported across the Atlantic year-round along seasonally varying transport routes. In this study, we retrieve the height of dust plumes over ocean in outflows off the West-African coast from satellite measurements of backscattered solar radiation.
We retrieve Aerosol Layer Height (ALH) from SCIAMACHY measurements of the oxygen A absorption band using the operational retrieval setup for TROPOMI on the Sentinel-5 Precursor. We focus on the time period of 2007-2008, because the SAMUM-2 measurement campaigns took place at Cape Verde during that period and a MACC-II reanalysis run with improved dust parameterizations covering the same period was recently completed. One of the criteria for pixel selection was a high value for the Absorbing Aerosol Index so that we know a priori that pixels contain significant amounts of (elevated) dust.
We will briefly explain the general measurement principle and we will show SCIAMACHY retrieval results and comparisons with external data sets for a number of case studies.