Search results for "Optical depth"
showing 10 items of 77 documents
Long-term (1995-2018) aerosol optical depth derived using ground based AERONET and SKYNET measurements from aerosol aged-background sites
2019
Abstract We examined long-term aerosol optical depth (AOD) trends over 53 sites across the globe which comprise 49 sites from the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) and 4 sites from the Sky radiometer Network (SKYNET) during 1995–2018. Most of these sites are located in remote and isolated aged-background regions, and few are in urban/semi-urban sites having averaged AOD ∼0.1 at 500 nm. These selected sites have a global distribution including tropical, mid-latitudes, high-latitudes and Polar regions. Among them, there are 14 high-altitude stations (∼1028–5050 m amsl), including Himalayan and Polar regions. The main objective of the present work is to evaluate the AOD trends over the aged-ba…
Interannual Variability of Biomass (SMOS Vegetation Optical Depth) Over the Contiguous United States
2021
Interannual variability in biomass represented by SMOS vegetation optical depth (VOD) and precipitation was assessed over the Contiguous United States. The greatest interannual variability in both VOD and precipitation occurred in shrubs and herbaceous (grasslands), with forests the least variable. At a continental scale, VOD was strongly correlated with annual precipitation. Results showed a significant correlation coefficient (∼ 0.93) between interannual variability of precipitation and biomass, indicating that the interannual variability of precipitation could be a good predictor of the interannual variability of biomass.
INTEGRAL/RXTE Observations of Cygnus X-1
2003
We present first results from contemporaneous observations of Cygnus X-1 with INTEGRAL and RXTE, made during INTEGRAL's performance verification phase in 2002 November and December. Consistent with earlier results, the 3-250 keV data are well described by Comptonization spectra from a Compton corona with a temperature of kT~50-90 keV and an optical depth of tau~1.0-1.3 plus reflection from a cold or mildly ionized slab with a covering factor of Omega/2pi~0.2-0.3. A soft excess below 10 keV, interpreted as emission from the accretion disk, is seen to decrease during the 1.5 months spanned by our observations. Our results indicate a remarkable consistency among the independently calibrated de…
Remote sensing of vegetation dynamics in agro-ecosystems using smap vegetation optical depth and optical vegetation indices
2017
The ESA's SMOS and the NASA's SMAP missions, launched in 2009 and 2015, respectively, are the first two missions having on-board L-band microwave sensors, which are very sensitive to the water content in soils and vegetation. Focusing on the vegetation signal at L-band, we have implemented an inversion approach for SMAP that allows deriving vegetation optical depth (VOD, a microwave parameter related to biomass and plant water content) alongside soil moisture, without reliance on ancillary optical information on vegetation. This work aims at using this new observational data to monitor the phenology of crops in major global agro-ecosystems and enhance present agricultural monitoring and pre…
Sensitivity of L-band vegetation optical depth to carbon stocks in tropical forests: a comparison to higher frequencies and optical indices
2019
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111303. Monitoring vegetation carbon in tropical regions is essential to the global carbon assessment and to evaluate the actions oriented to the reduction of forest degradation. Mainly, satellite optical vegetation indices and LiDAR data have been used to this purpose. These two techniques are limited by cloud cover and are sensitive only to the top of vegetation. In addition, the vegetation attenuation to the soil microwave emission, represented by the vegetation optical depth (VOD), has been applied for biomass estimation using frequencies ranging from 4 to 30¿GHz (C- to K-bands). Atmosphere is t…
Influence of heterogeneous freezing on the microphysical and radiative properties of orographic cirrus clouds
2013
The influence of heterogeneous freezing on the microphysical and optical properties of orographic cirrus clouds has been simulated with the large eddy simulation model EULAG. Idealised simulations with different concentrations of ice nuclei (IN) in a dynamically dominated regime with high vertical velocities have been performed. Furthermore the temperature at cloud formation as well as the critical supersaturation for initiation of heterogenous freezing have been varied. The shortwave, longwave and net cloud forcing has been calculated under the assumption that the clouds form between 06:00 and 12:00 local time (LT) or between 12:00 and 18:00 LT. In general it can be seen that the onset of …
Highly controlled optical transport of cold atoms into a hollow-core fiber
2018
We report on an efficient and highly controlled cold atom hollow-core fiber interface, suitable for quantum simulation, information, and sensing. The main focus of this manuscript is a detailed study on transporting cold atoms into the fiber using an optical conveyor belt. We discuss how we can precisely control the spatial, thermal, and temporal distribution of the atoms by, e.g., varying the speed at which the atoms are transported or adjusting the depth of the transport potential according to the atomic position. We characterize the transport of atoms to the fiber tip for these different parameters. In particular, we show that by adapting the transport potential we can lower the temperat…
Power spectrum of turbulent convection in the solar photosphere
2020
The solar photosphere provides us with a laboratory for understanding turbulence in a layer where the fundamental processes of transport vary rapidly and a strongly superadiabatic region lies very closely to a subadiabatic layer. Our tools for probing the turbulence are high-resolution spectropolarimetric observations such as have recently been obtained with the two balloon-borne SUNRISE missions, and numerical simulations. Our aim is to study photospheric turbulence with the help of Fourier power spectra that we compute from observations and simulations. We also attempt to explain some properties of the photospheric overshooting flow with the help of its governing equations and simulations…
L-Band vegetation optical depth for crop phenology monitoring and crop yield assessment
2018
Vegetation Optical Depth (VOD) at L-band is highly sensitive to the water content and above-ground biomass of vegetation. Hence, it has great potential for monitoring crop phenology and for providing crop yield forecasts. Recently, the Multi-Temporal Dual Channel Algorithm (MT -DCA) has been proposed to retrieve L-band VOD from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) measurements. In previous research, SMAP VOD has been compared to crop phenology and has been used to derive crop yield estimates. Here, we review and expand these initial research studies. In particular, we quantify the capability of VOD to detect different crop stages, and test different VOD metrics (i.e., maximum, range and inte…
Subvisible cirrus clouds - a dynamical system approach
2018
Ice clouds, so-called cirrus clouds, occur very frequently in the tropopause region. A special class are subvisible cirrus clouds with an optical depth lower than 0.03, associated with very low ice crystal number concentrations. The dominant pathway for the formation of these clouds is not known well. It is often assumed that heterogeneous nucleation on solid aerosol particles is the preferred mechanism although homogeneous freezing of aqueous solution droplets might be possible, since these clouds occur in the low-temperature regime T < 235 K. For investigating subvisible cirrus clouds as formed by homogeneous freezing we develop a reduced cloud model from first principles, which is close …