Looking up from airplanes: understanding impact of aerosol and cloud on transmitted sunlight
Aerosol, clouds, and their interactions contribute to the largest uncertainties in predicting future climate and understanding atmospheric processes. Airborne sunphotometry and sky radiometry is able to quantify aerosol and cloud properties useful for disentangling atmospheric processes and reduce uncertainties by measuring these quantities directly in the atmosphere using research aircraft. I present here an overview of aerosol and cloud properties measured by the Spectrometer for Sky-Scanning, Sun-Tracking Atmospheric Research (4STAR), a hyperspectral airborne sunphotometer and sky radiometer. Examples presented here come from various field mission measurements. I will present basic measurement and retrieval techniques and how these measurements are used to answer some science questions. Examples presented here will be: contrasting estimates of cloud radiative effect of cirrus outflow from a tropical storm, quantifying the change in cloud properties crossing the sea ice edge in the Beaufort sea during sea ice minimum, quantifying the aerosol burden from biomass burning over clouds in the South East Atlantic, and accessing the consistency of aerosol optical depth as compared to aerosol size and color in the Korean peninsula.
