Development of a real-time for deriving the optical properties of aerosol particles in PANGEA observatory, using ground-based passive remote sensing measurements

Abstract

The goal of this work is to create an automated tool that calculates in near real-time the optical properties of aerosol particles observed in the PANhellenic GEophysical observatory of Antikythera (PANGEA), when the particles have spherical shapes. For this scope we use the microphysical properties of the particles provided from the sun-photometer measurements at the station by the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET; Holben et al., 1998), and the Mie scattering code (Mie, 1908). First, the microphysical properties of the particles are automatically downloaded and displayed for the user. Then, we use them as input in the Mie code and we calculate the extinction, scattering, absorption and backscatter coefficients of the particles. The constructed tool focuses mainly on the lidar-related optical properties. These properties can be used in the future step of this work, that will aim to combine the sun-photometer with lidar measurements for better characterization of aerosol vertical properties. In order to fulfill the objectives of this work we need to: 1. Create a tool that automatically downloads from the AERONET website the retrieved microphysical properties of the particles at the Antikythera AERONET station. 2. Check if the particles have spherical shapes, by requiring the percentage of spherical particles in the atmospheric volume to be >98%. This parameter is provided in the AERONET aerosol product. 3. In case (2) is true, use the Mie code to calculate the particle optical properties: the extinction, absorption, scattering and backscatter coefficients.