An investigation of the Enhanced Southern Oceans Anomaly (ESOA) over high latitude oceans

The Enhanced Southern Oceans Anomaly (ESOA) refers to a high aerosol optical depth belt over the high latitude southern oceans as reported from both the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) aerosol products. The ESOA feature, however, is not present in the ground-based Maritime Aerosol Network (MAN) observations. In this study, the contributions of cloud contamination and oceanic bubbles to the ESOA phenomenon are studied.

The impact of cloud contamination on the ESOA feature is examined through the use of active remote sensing measurements from the high vertical resolution Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument. However, the ESOA phenomenon cannot be fully explained by cloud contamination even with the application of the most stringent cloud screening methods. As the next step, a linked oceanic and atmospheric radiative transfer model is constructed to evaluate the impacts of oceanic bubbles on the ESOA phenomenon. To our knowledge, this is the first time oceanic bubbles have been considered for satellite remote sensing of atmospheric aerosols.