Using Retrieved Aerosol Spectral Properties to Characterize Aerosol Composition and Mixing

Abstract:

The spectral dependence of aerosol properties, such as aerosol absorption optical depth (AAOD) and single scattering albedo (SSA), can be used to infer aerosol composition. In particular, aerosol mixtures dominated by dust absorption will have monotonically increasing SSA with wavelength while that dominated by black carbon absorption has monotonically decreasing SSA spectra. However, spectral AAOD and SSA measured in reality may differ from these extreme cases, due to the complicated composition and mixing states. In this study, we use spectral SSA and AAOD retrieved from AERONET measurements, assisted by CALIPSO aerosol type product and Mie calculations, to characterize aerosol mixtures over representative regions. Moreover, in addition to the monotonically increasing or decreasing AAOD and SSA spectra, we find the spectral dependence of these two parameters are frequently peaked (at 675 nm or 870 nm) over several places including East Asia, India, West Africa and South America. We thus suggest that SSA spectral curvature, defined as the negative of the second derivative of SSA as a function of wavelength, can provide additional information on the composition of these aerosol mixtures. Further analysis indicates that moderate mixing of black carbon with dust or organic carbon is mainly responsible for producing the SSA curvature. An optimization scheme was developed to match the observed AAOD and SSA spectra with Mie calculations assuming different aerosol composition and mixing states. Results suggest that while external mixing can explain most of the observed AAOD and SSA spectral dependence, internal mixing or core-shell mode is also likely under many circumstances, such as East Asia during winter and post-monsoon and winter seasons over India. This method offers the potential to quantitatively infer aerosol composition from these spectral measurements of aerosol optical properties.