Gacp Third Year Progress Report

This proposal describes work combining active and passive ground-based methods to better understand the physical properties of aerosols to improve the retrieval of these properties from passive satellite data. The proposal joins the resources of the Atmospheric Remote Sensing Laboratory (ARSL) and the Remote Sensing Group (RSG) of the University of Arizona to capitalize on the expertise of both groups and their complement of field instrumentation. The groups will study data from past field campaigns for innovative combinations of these groundand aircraft-based measurements to help develop techniques for the retrieval of aerosol properties from satellite data. The research also relies on field campaigns funded through other projects to improve ground-based validation techniques and to constrain the uncertainties from satellite-retrieved aerosol properties. A key element of this project is the combination of active and passive approaches through the use of Micro-Pulse Lidar (MPL) linked with solar irradiance and sky radiance measurements. Also, critical to this work will be the retrieval of the single scatter albedo at several sites in the desert southwest to investigate the feasibility of regular around-based monitoring of this parameter.