Source of Support: NASA Grant # NNX10AM94G
Award Amount: $93,380
Period Covered: 07/01/2010 to 06/30/2012
The largest uncertainty in computer models of the future climate is the magnitude of the primary and secondary aerosol climate feedbacks. In order to understand the contribution of changing tropospheric aerosol burdens on climate and constrain the associated uncertainties, it is imperative to quantify the current global distribution of aerosols. The goal of current research is to assemble a seamless time series of global aerosol observations from the plethora of aerosol data now available from NASA, NOAA and ESA satellites, which can be used to validate and initialize climate models. However, differences between near-coincident satellite observations of aerosol parameters are often larger than the respective reported uncertainties. The scientific community is currently concentrating on identifying, understanding and resolving specific differences between tropospheric aerosol observations.
