Impact AEOLUS Extinction Assimilation on Dust Transport

Atmospheric aerosols, including desert dust, are important components of the Earth System and affect both the environment and human activity. Today, most operational Numerical Weather Prediction centers are primarily assimilating Aerosol Optical Depth observations, which corrects the total dust load in the atmosphere but not its vertical distribution. This shortcoming can be filled with space-borne and ground-based lidars.

Aeolus, which launched in 2018 and deorbited in 2024, was a successful wind lidar mission. In addition to the wind products, it also provided the L2A aerosol product. During the ESA L2A+ project, this aerosol product was enhanced through data fusion techniques to provide more accurate profiles of optical properties for dust. The improvement was assessed through assimilation of the product in WRF-CHEM using the Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART). Our results were validated using data from the ESA-ASKOS tropical campaign, which took place in Cabo Verde during the summers of 2021 and 2022, and other independent aerosol optical measurements (such as AERONET and MODIS).

The L2A+ team acknowledges support by ESA in the framework of the "Enhancing Aeolus L2A for depolarizing targets and impact on aerosol research and NWP project (4000139424/22/I-NS). This work was supported by computational time granted from the National Infrastructures for Research and Technology S.A. (GRNET S.A.) in the National HPC facility - ARIS - under project ID pr014048_thin.