What methods do YOU mean? for what characteristics; please you have to be more specific as ResearchGate suggest. You see this at the top right of a topic page

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Detailed process level studies of aerosols, clouds and radiation are needed and being performed by US DOE's ARM and ASR program and others. These can improve their treatment in climate models. You can look at some papers on my account and search for ARM and ASR.

Have a look at Chemosphere 49 (2002) 1009–1043 Monitoring of particulate matter outdoors

Nestor

That is behind a paywall?! and we do not know what the questioner means with "uncertainties in determining of atmos aerosol characteristics"

1. What uncertainties

2. In what characteristics

Sorry for a delay...

Thank you for answers. I'll try to be more specific.

Spatial and temporal variation of aerosol physical and chemical properties and their impact on the climate are studied by using the ground-based measurements by sun photometers and lidars networks, and satellite observations of optical radiation scattered by the earth’s atmosphere and surface. The satellite techniques enable us to derive the aerosol distribution over the globe by scanning the atmosphere and surface along and across satellite ground tracks at specific overpass time. There are several data sets of global aerosol properties over land and oceans available from various satellite sensors, e.g., MODIS, MERIS, MISR, AVHRR, POLDER, TOMS and OMI, that cover rather long time spans from months to decades. The ground-based technique also allows the continuous accumulation of data over long periods of time (years and decades) but only at specific observational locations. From data collected by both ground-based and satellite techniques, aerosol properties are estimated as the parameters of models solving the inverse problem. The extreme complexity and variability of earth’s atmospheresurface system are the main source of errors when retrieving aerosol parameters from satellite data.

As you remember from IPCC Climate Change (2007) http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig2-4.jpg the atmospheric aerosols have biggest uncertainties in radiative forcing. How can we reduce them?

Andrii

You now provide a much more extensive but therefore much more limited question.

You do not have to remember me of AR4 (see recent publication

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233428112_The_impact_of_aerosols_on_regional_climate)

2 things

-in the draft AR5 the aerosol effects are lowered

-modeling one needs the composition because the formation of secondary aerosol depend on emissions of non-aerosol compounds

new things

there will be space borne lidar

absorptive aerosol is also retrieved

Article The impact of aerosols on regional climate

i recommend LIEPERT, B., AND U. LOHMANN, 1999: AN INDIRECT VALIDATION OF THE INDIRECT AEROSOL EFFECT:

GCM RESULTS VS. LONG-TERM OBSERVATIONS. IN PREPARATION.

LIEPERT, B., ANDI.TEGEN, 1999: THE TEMPORAL VARIATION OF THE DIRECT AEROSOL RADIATIVE

FORCING AS OBSERVED AND MODELED. IN PREPARATION

regards

Thank you Harry ten Brink and Eduardo Fuentes for articles that related to this subject.

Ken

Do you mean in this question or in general?

The questioner here is concerned with the radiative properties as he finally specified later on in the discussion, when asked for

Ken

There are only few specialists who have actually measured these esoteric aerosols. I can imagine the costs of flights in the arctic. I googled and there is of course literature on the so-called NAT-rocks

Ken

I only know of NAT and the arctic from what I mostly heard at meetings. Ozone hole is at the Antarctic

Ken

My answer was on your question on the composition and form of the NAT: there is just (more) info north because the flights are "cheaper"

Large (>2 μm diameter) HNO3-containing polar stratospheric cloud (PSC) particles were measured in situ by the NOAA NOy instrument on board the NASA ER-2 aircraft during seven flights in the 1999/2000 Arctic winter vortex

Harry

I too have read the Brooks et al. paper. Indeed there is inference from lab studies by a.o. Koops with which I am more familiar. This is an area in which research is limited by the funding and only performed in the countries in which expertise is already present. One needs a low-temperature low-P environmental chamber.

I fully agree with you that characterization of the mechanism might need extra efforts, however I myself are not aware where the major gap would be at present and whether that could be attacked in the lab or that observations are needed.

One thing I can tell you from decades of experience, to characterise ambient aerosol is so darn difficult because it is so variable and there always something that in hindsight you'd like to know but has not been measured

My understanding is that the original question was general, not limited tot he Arctic. However, it is not clear what characteristics are to be derived: optical or chemical (composition, size distribution,...)?

Chris

This was discussed earlier in this question and you can access it when you click on

"show previous comments" at the top of the list of answers at the top of this page

I asked about optical properties, because if we would have information about physical and optical properties with better precision and will use retrieving algorithm without serious limitation, it can be possible to reduce uncertainties.

Andrii

You ask now for optical properties AND physical properties. What physical properties do you mean for retrieval? Again, every aerosol particles is different form the next one. So to what detail do you want the information. What is the geographical scale the vertical scale and the temporal scale? and where do you think you can get this information?

One answer: you to first intensively study the new IPCC report of WG1 with a full chapter on aerosol/cloud. That contains the info regarding global aerosol.

You can see that in order to come to assessing the global aerosol fields one has to start with the chemistry modeling first.

Yes, optical and physical properties, for example, single scattering albedo, the real and imaginary part of refractive index, volume size distribution, phase function and its asymmetry factor, absorption and extinction optical depth and some others.

Geographical scale: Earth

Vertical scale: from the ground to 80 km.

Where i can get this information with uncertainties smaller than 1% ?

For AOD (total column), which is the main optical characteristic in most applications, we are still far from this kind of uncertainty, even with the best instrumentation from ground-observing stations (e.g., Aeronet). The uncertainty is even much larger for satellite observations or model predictions, which are the only ways to obtain global (planetary) coverage.

In summary, I think we are still far from the ideal objective described by your question...