Studying optical properties of atmospheric aerosol is important because aerosol affects people around the world significantly. Aerosol can directly affect climate change by scattering and absorption of solar and other radiations, and also indirectly affect the radiation by affecting cloud formation. Tropospheric aerosol is associated with air pollution and adverse health effects. These effects ...

Organic chemistry in aerosol water has recently been recognized as a potentially important source of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) material. This SOA material may be surface-active, therefore potentially affecting aerosol heterogeneous activity, ice nucleation, and CCN activity. Aqueous aerosol chemistry has also been shown to be a potential source of light-absorbing products ("brown carbon")...

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a method for measuring the vapor pressure distribution and volatility-dependent mass spectrum of organic aerosol particles using a thermodenuder-particle beam mass spectrometer. The method is well suited for use with the widely used Aerodyne Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS) and other quantitative aerosol mass spectrometers. The data that can...

A scanning UV-Visible spectrometer, the GEMS (Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer) onboard the GEO-KOMPSAT2B (Geostationary Korea MultiPurpose Satellite) is planned to be launched in geostationary orbit in 2018. The GEMS employs hyper-spectral imaging with 0.6 nm resolution to observe solar backscatter radiation in the UV and Visible range. In the UV range, the low surface contrib...

[1] Forcing by absorbing atmospheric black carbon (BC) tends to heat the atmosphere, cool the surface, and reduce the surface latent and sensible heat fluxes. BC aerosol can have a large impact on regional climates and the hydrologic cycle. However, significant uncertainties remain concerning the increases in (1) the total amount of all aerosol species and (2) the amount of aerosol absorption t...

An aerosol generation, calibration, and research facility has been developed with the major purpose of evaluating aerosol instrumentation, including quality assurance testing, intercomparison, performance evaluation, and calibration of aerosol sizing, bulk, and speciated mass-measuring instruments. The aerosol facility also provides excellent opportunities for basic aerosol research. Polydisper...

Understanding aerosol effects on global climate requires knowing the global distribution of tropospheric aerosols. By accounting for aerosol sources, transports, and removal processes, chemical transport models simulate the global aerosol distribution using archived meteorological fields. We develop an algorithm for retrieving global aerosol sources from satellite observations of aerosol distri...

The multi-wavelength retrieval algorithm is used to retrieve aerosol parameters from spectra reflectance measurements of the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI). This retrieval algorithm uses up to 19 wavelength bands between 331 nm and 500 nm including a band at 477 nm comprising an absorption band of O2-O2. This absorption band has been included in order to increase the amount of height informa...