Study On Marine Boundary Layer Aerosol Structure based on Satellite Observations

Abstract

The aerosol vertical distribution in the boundary layer is heavily influenced by the boundary layer thermal structure. This paper studied on marine boundary layer (MBL) aerosol and its structure by using satellite lidar measurements. The lidar methodology was improved and applied to the 3-year satellite MBL aerosol observations over Oceans, and a new global ocean dataset was built. The global MBL structure were examined and discussed with the new dataset. Results showed that the BLH generally increases and MLH generally decreases when away from the coast. Further analyze shows that the MBL tends to be more well-mixed with lower BLH, and the aerosol loading shows weaker relationships with U10m under overcast conditions than partly cloudy conditions.  This study demonstrated that satellite lidar measurements have the great potential in evaluating and constraining both modeled MBL aerosol optical properties and modeled MBL structure.