Elina Giannakaki1, Detlef Muller2, Dimitris Balis1, Vassilis Amiridis2

1Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124, Greece
2Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, Leipzig, Germany
3Institute for Space Applications and Remote Sensing, National Observatory of Athens, I. Metaxa & V. Pavlou, 15236, Penteli, Athens, Greece

 

A measuring campaign was held at Thessaloniki, Greece (40.6° N, 22.9° E) in July 2006 in the framework of the integrated project “Stratosphere-Climate Links with Emphasis on the Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere” (SCOUT-O3). One of the main objectives of the campaign was to determine aerosol properties and their impact on the UV irradiance at the Earth’s surface. In this paper we present vertically resolved microphysical aerosol properties retrieved from the inversion of optical data that were obtained from a combined one-wavelength Raman/two-wavelength backscatter lidar system and a CIMEL sunphotometer. A number of assumptions were undertaken to overcome the limitations of the existing optical input data needed for the retrieval of microphysical properties. We found acceptable agreement with AERONET retrievals for the fine mode particle effective radius which ranged between 0.11 and 0.19 for the campaign period while for an accurate retrieval of the complex refractive index additional optical information is needed. It is shown that under complex layering of the aerosols general assumptions can provide unrealistic retrievals, especially in the presence of aged smoke aerosols. It was found that with this instrument setup the inversion algorithm can be applied successfully also for the complex refractive index of cases of vertically homogeneous layers of continental polluted aerosols. For these inversion cases the vertically resolved retrievals for the single scattering albedo showed values around 0.9 at 532 nm which were in very good agreement with results from airborne in-situ observations that were carried out near the lidar station.