Scientific Objectives, Measurement Needs, and Challenges Motivating the PARAGON Aerosol Initiative
Abstract
Aerosols are involved in a complex set of processes that operate across many spatial and temporal scales. Understanding these processes, and ensuring their accurate representation in models of transport, radiation transfer, and climate, requires knowledge of aerosol physical, chemical, and optical properties and the distributions of these properties in space and time. To derive aerosol climate forcing, aerosol optical and microphysical properties and their spatial and temporal distributions, and aerosol interactions with clouds, need to be understood. Such data are also required in conjunction with size-resolved chemical composition in order to evaluate chemical transport models and to distinguish natural and anthropogenic forcing. Other basic parameters needed for modeling the radiative influences of aerosols are surface reflectivity and three-dimensional cloud fields. This large suite of parameters mandates an integrated observing and modeling system of commensurate scope. The Progressive Aerosol Retrieval and Assimilation Global Observing Network (PARAGON) concept, designed to meet this requirement, is motivated by the need to understand climate system sensitivity to changes in atmospheric constituents, to reduce climate model uncertainties, and to analyze diverse collections of data pertaining to aerosols. This paper highlights several challenges resulting from the complexity of the problem. Approaches for dealing with them are offered in the set of companion papers.
Additional Information
© 2004 American Meteorological Society. In final form 28 July 2004. Support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy is gratefully acknowledged. The research of R. A. Kahn, R. Davies, and D. J. Diner was conducted at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. T. L. Anderson and R. J. Charlson acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (Grant ATM-0138250).Attached Files
Published - SEIbams04b.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 27298
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20111019-092332903
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- ATM-0138250
- NSF
- Created
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2011-10-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field