Assessment of error in aerosol optical depth measured by AERONET due to aerosol forward scattering

作者：Sinyuk Alexander^*; Holben Brent N; Smirnov Alexander; Eck Thomas F; Slutsker Ilya; Schafer Joel S; Giles David M; Sorokin Mikhail

来源：Geophysical Research Letters, 2012, 39: L23806.

DOI：10.1029/2012GL053894

We present an analysis of the effect of aerosol forward scattering on the accuracy of aerosol optical depth (AOD) measured by CIMEL Sun photometers. The effect is quantified in terms of AOD and solar zenith angle using radiative transfer modeling. The analysis is based on aerosol size distributions derived from multi-year climatologies of AERONET aerosol retrievals. The study shows that the modeled error is lower than AOD calibration uncertainty (0.01) for the vast majority of AERONET level 2 observations, similar to 99.53%. Only similar to 0.47% of the AERONET database corresponding mostly to dust aerosol with high AOD and low solar elevations has larger biases. We also show that observations with extreme reductions in direct solar irradiance do not contribute to level 2 AOD due to low Sun photometer digital counts below a quality control cutoff threshold. Citation: Sinyuk, A., B. N. Holben, A. Smirnov, T. F. Eck, I. Slutsker, J. S. Schafer, D. M. Giles, and M. Sorokin (2012), Assessment of error in aerosol optical depth measured by AERONET due to aerosol forward scattering, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L23806, doi: 10.1029/2012GL053894.

• 出版日期2012-12-13