NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division has made long-term, surface in situ measurements of aerosol optical properties since the mid-1970s. Our goal is to characterise the means, variability, and trends of climate-forcing properties of different types of aerosols, and to understand the factors that control theses properties. Measurements were initially only made at very remote background sites that have since frown to include measurements at more regionally representative sites. The regional sites are important because human activities primarily influence aerosols on regional/continental scales either than global scales. Today, NOAA’s Federal Aerosol Network comprises approximately 30 long-term sites making spectral measurements of aerosol light absorption and scattering. The long-term data sets resulting from the NOAA Federal Aerosol Network can be used to identify temporal and spatial patterns in the atmospheric aerosol as well as for validation of satellite products and model simulations. This talk will provide an overview of NOAA’s Federal Aerosol Network – measurements, sites and network evolution, and will touch briefly on several examples of how the long-term aerosol data have been used win the past. The remainder of the talk will focus on our current research using measurements of aerosol optical properties to evaluate global climate models.
Webcast: http://connect.sunet.se/bgcatm
Lectures Archive: http//vimeo.com/bgcatm/videos/
