AIRSENSE (Aerosol and aerosol-cloud Interaction from Remote SENSing Enhancement)
The AIRSENSE project focuses on enhancing the comprehensive aerosol characterization and the understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions by generating and enriching novel products by multi-instrument synergy and combined products of passive space-borne instruments, and by adding advanced active remote sensing products mainly from the EarthCARE satellite.
The project is coordinated by GRASP SAS Lille, France, and the whole consortium consists of in total eight partners (institutes, universities, industry).
Contribution of TROPOS
Within AIRSENSE, TROPOS is responsible for developing novel space-borne lidar products and science studies using observations, and is contributing to further work packages such as validation activities of the newly developed products.
The development of space-borne lidar products is aiming to estimate microphysical and cloud-relevant aerosol parameters from aerosol optical properties measured by EarthCARE ATLID. These parameters are a prerequisite to do aerosol-cloud-interactions studies. Therefore, available methodologies to retrieve estimates of those parameters have to be made applicable to the EarthCARE ATLID wavelength of 355 nm.
The science studies using observations are focusing firstly on growth of aerosol by water uptake and its potential influence on aerosol optical properties, which can be investigated by means of water vapor measurements by ground-based Raman lidars, and secondly, on trend analyses of mineral dust and upper tropospheric/lower stratospheric (smoke and volcanic) aerosol and their influence on cloud formation.
Project information
We acknowledge the European Space Agency (ESA) for funding the AIRSENSE project through the contract 4000142902/23/I-NS in the framework of the ESA Atmosphere Science Cluster – Research Opportunities 5 – European Coordinated Study on Aerosols and Aerosol/Cloud Interactions.