Search results for " Planetary"
showing 10 items of 5408 documents
The transatlantic dust transport from North Africa to the Americas-Its characteristics and source regions
2015
Transport of Saharan dust over the Atlantic to the Americas is a relevant process since dust is a nutrient for marine and terrestrial ecosystems. It is therefore important to better quantify the frequency and amount of transatlantic dust transport, its preferred altitude and duration, and the regions of dust origin. This study uses a novel combination of Eulerian and Lagrangian diagnostics, applied to a previously validated 5 year simulation of the fifth generation European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast-Hamburg-model (ECHAM5)/Modular Earth Submodel System (MEESy) Atmospheric Chemistry model, to quantify these dust transport characteristics and their seasonal variations. Results c…
Comparing irradiance fields derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer airborne simulator cirrus cloud retrievals with solar spectral…
2007
[1] During the Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers–Florida Area Cirrus Experiment, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) airborne simulator (MAS) and the solar spectral flux radiometer (SSFR) operated on the same aircraft, the NASA ER-2. While MAS provided two-dimensional horizontal fields of cloud optical thickness and effective ice particle radius, the SSFR measured spectral irradiance in the visible to near-infrared wavelength range (0.3–1.7 μm). The MAS retrievals, along with vertical profiles from a combined radar/lidar system on board the same aircraft were used to construct three-dimensional cloud fields, which were input into Monte Carlo ra…
A new method to retrieve the aerosol layer absorption coefficient from airborne flux density and actinic radiation measurements
2010
A new method is presented to derive the mean value of the spectral absorption coefficient of an aerosol layer from combined airborne measurements of spectral net irradiance and actinic flux density. While the method is based on a theoretical relationship of radiative transfer theory, it is applied to atmospheric radiation measurements for the first time. The data have been collected with the Spectral Modular Airborne Radiation Measurement System (SMARTA¢ÂÂAlbedometer), the Solar Spectral Flux Radiometer (SSFR), and the Actinic Flux Spectroradiometer (AFSR) during four field campaigns between 2002 and 2008 (the Saharan Mineral Dust Experiment (SAMUM), the Influence of Clouds on the Spectra…
Mixing relationships and the effects of secondary alteration in the Wishstone and Watchtower Classes of Husband Hill, Gusev Crater, Mars
2006
[1] The Wishstone and Watchtower Class rocks on Husband Hill preserve evidence for a geochemical relationship consistent with two-component mixing between a high Al 2 O 3 , TiO 2 , CaO, Na 2 O, P 2 O 5 end-member and a second end-member enriched in the elements MgO, Zn, S, Br, and Cl. The first end-member appears to be reasonably well represented by rocks of the Wishstone Class, while the second end-member is consistent with a chemical component, not represented by any lithology encountered by Spirit. The Watchtower Class appears to be an intermediate in the mixture. The concentration of the redox sensitive elements Fe and Mn display no systematic variation between rock classes, and the Fe-…
New investigations on homogeneous ice nucleation: the effects of water activity and water saturation formulations
2022
Laboratory measurements at the AIDA cloud chamber and airborne in-situ observations suggest that the homogeneous freezing thresholds at low temperatures are possibly higher than expected from the so-called “Koop-line”. This finding is of importance, because the ice onset relative humidity affects the cirrus cloud coverage and, at the very low temperatures of the tropical tropopause layer, together with the number of ice crystals also the transport of water vapor into the stratosphere. Both, the appearance of cirrus clouds and the amount of stratospheric water feed back to the radiative budget of the atmosphere. In order to explore the enhanced ice onset humidities, we re-examine…
On the angular variation of thermal infrared emissivity of inorganic soils
2012
[1] Land surface temperature (LST), a key parameter for many environmental studies, can be most readily estimated by using thermal infrared (TIR) sensors onboard satellites. Accurate LST are contingent upon simultaneously accurate estimates of land surface emissivity (e), which depend on sensor viewing angle and the anisotropy of optical and structural properties of surfaces. In the case of inorganic bare soils (IBS), there are still few data that quantify emissivity angular effects. The present work deals with the angular variation of TIR emissivity for twelve IBS types, representative of nine of the twelve soil textures found on Earth according to United States Department of Agriculture c…
A generalized single‐channel method for retrieving land surface temperature from remote sensing data
2003
[1] Many papers have developed algorithms to retrieve land surface temperature from at-sensor and land surface emissivity data. These algorithms have been specified for different thermal sensors on board satellites, i.e., the algorithm used for one thermal sensor (or a combination of thermal sensors) cannot be used for other thermal sensor. The main goal of this paper is to propose a generalized single-channel algorithm that only uses the total atmospheric water vapour content and the channel effective wavelength (assuming that emissivity is known), and can be applied to thermal sensors characterized with a FWHM (Full-Width Half-Maximum) of around 1 μm actually operative on board satellites…
A laboratory study on the uptake of HCl, HNO3, and SO2 gas by ice crystals and the effect of these gases on the evaporation rate of the crystals
1998
The results of our new and earlier laboratory studies on the uptake of gases by ice crystals are summarized in terms of (1) the equilibrium phase diagram for a system gas/H2O, (2) the effect of these gases on the evaporation rate of ice crystals, and (3) in terms of the uptake of the gases by water drops. It is shown that the intrinsic quasi-liquid layer significantly affects the uptake of a gas by an ice surface in that, depending on the gas phase concentration, the layer thickness may be considerably increased by depressing the equilibrium freezing point causing additional surface melting. It is further shown that the evaporation rate of ice particles previously exposed to a gas may becom…
Effects of ice crystal habit on thermal infrared radiative properties and forcing of cirrus
2007
[1] The impact of assumed ice crystal morphology on thermal infrared (IR) radiative properties of subtropical cirrus is quantified. In particular, the crystal-shape-dependent profiles of downwelling and upwelling thermal IR (broadband and spectral) irradiances and the radiative forcing of cirrus (at the top and bottom of the atmosphere) are investigated. For this purpose, airborne measurements of ice crystal size distribution (in terms of ice crystal maximum dimension) from the CRYSTAL-FACE campaign and a recently published library of thermal IR optical properties of nonspherical ice crystal habits are implemented into radiative transfer simulations. Two cirrus cases are studied in detail: …
Depth selective Mössbauer spectroscopy: Analysis and simulation of 6.4 keV and 14.4 keV spectra obtained from rocks at Gusev Crater, Mars, and layere…
2008
[1] The miniaturized Mossbauer spectrometer (MIMOS) II Mossbauer spectrometers on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) simultaneously obtained 6.4 keV and 14.4 keV Mossbauer spectra from rock and soil targets. Because photons with lower energy have a shallower penetration depth, 6.4 keV spectra contain more mineralogical information about the near-surface region of a sample than do 14.4 keV spectra. The influence of surface layers of varying composition and thickness on Mossbauer spectra was investigated by Monte Carlo simulation and by measurement using a copy of the MER MIMOS II instrument and samples with one or two layers of known thicknesses. Thin sections of minerals or metallic Fe foil …