Long-term Aerosol Climate Data Records from Modis and Seawifs over Land and Ocean

The impact of natural and anthropogenic sources of a ir pollution has gained increasing attention from scientific communities in recent years. Indeed , tropospheric aerosols not only perturb rad iative energy balance by interacting with solar and terrestrial rad iation, but also by changing cloud properties and lifetime. Furthermore, these anthropogenic and natural air pollutants, once generated over the source regions, can be transported out of the boundary layer into the free troposphere and can travel thousands of kilometers across the oceans resulting in important biogeochemical impacts on the ecosystem. Due to the relatively short lifetime (a few hours to about a week), the d istributions of these airborne particles vary extensively in both space and time. Consequently, satellite obse rvations are needed over both source and sink regions for continuous temporal and spatial sampling of dust properties.