Direct, Longwave Radiative Forcing of Mineral Dust: Improvement of its Estimation by Means of Tools Recently Developed by the EARLINET Community

Abstract

The objective of this work is to investigate how the knowledge of the vertically-resolved fine and coarse mode aerosol optical depth modifies the longwave radiative forcing. Since relatively little the EARLINET (European Aerosol Research Lidar Network) community has developed codes that combine sun-photometer and lidar data to retrieve a set of parameters vertically-resolved related to the size distribution (fine and coarse mode extinction coefficients, fine and coarse mode volumetric concentrations, etc.). We concentrate on the case of mineral dust whose size distribution is often dominated by the coarse mode. This work demonstrates that the knowledge of the vertically-resolved fine and coarse mode aerosol optical depth modifies the LW RF as compared to the classical approach with a unique profile of total aerosol optical depth. The results show that when the coarse mode predominates the classical approach underestimates the dust longwave radiative forcing by 10 to 20 % at the surface. The effect at the top of the atmosphere is not systematic because of the predominance of fine particles near the top of the dust layer.