Estimating the direct radiative effect of absorbing aerosols overlying marine boundary layer clouds in the southeast Atlantic using MODIS and CALIOP

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Abstract

Abstract Absorbing aerosols such as smoke strongly absorb solar radiation, particularly at ultraviolet and visible/near‐infrared (VIS/NIR) wavelengths, and their presence above clouds can have considerable implications. It has been previously shown that they have a positive (i.e., warming) direct aerosol radiative effect (DARE) when overlying bright clouds. Additionally, they can cause biased passive instrument satellite retrievals in techniques that rely on VIS/NIR wavelengths for inferring the cloud optical thickness (COT) and effective radius ( r e ) of underlying clouds, which can in turn yield biased above‐cloud DARE estimates. Here we investigate Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) cloud optical property retrieval biases due to overlying absorbing aerosols observed by Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) and examine the impact of these biases on above‐cloud DARE estimates. The investigation focuses on a region in the southeast Atlantic Ocean during August and September (2006–2011), where smoke from biomass burning in southern Africa overlies persistent marine boundary layer stratocumulus clouds. Adjusting for above‐cloud aerosol attenuation yields increases in the regional mean liquid COT (averaged over all ocean‐only liquid clouds) by roughly 6%; mean r e increases by roughly 2.6%, almost exclusively due to the COT adjustment in the non‐orthogonal retrieval space. It is found that these two biases lead to an underestimate of DARE. For liquid cloud Aqua MODIS pixels with CALIOP‐observed above‐cloud smoke, the regional mean above‐cloud radiative forcing efficiency (DARE per unit aerosol optical depth (AOD)) at time of observation (near local noon for Aqua overpass) increases from 50.9Wm −2 AOD −1 to 65.1Wm −2 AOD −1 when using bias‐adjusted instead of nonadjusted MODIS cloud retrievals.

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