The focus of this project is on advancing in methodologies for atmospheric aerosols characterization. Actually, the Executive Summary of the 2013 IPCC's states that reducing the uncertainty in direct aerosol radiative forcing is a necessary step in reconciling estimates of radiative forcing and the equilibrium climate sensitivity of the Earth so that future predictions of surface temperature associated with climate change can be made with confidence. To that end, improved aerosol knowledge about vertically resolved measurements is essentia and particularly aerosol absorption characterization. Previous space missions (e.g. e.g. Terra, Aqua, POLDER, CALIPSO or CloudSat platforms) were not able to provide layer-resolved aerosol absorption. The NASA Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystems (ACE) mission is 2007 Decadal Survey that addresses this problem. ACE was replaced by the Aerosol-Cloud-Convection-Precipitation (ACCP) mission following 2017 Decadal Survey and is already on phase of construction. ACCP includes multiwavelength lidar and polarimeter flying together but still there is no appropriate software for characterizing aerosol microphysical and optical properties from the space.
The main objective of this proposal is the development and implementation of the joint inversion in GRASP for space polarimeter + lidar instruments to retrieve independent and accurate vertical profiles of aerosol microphysical properties. Such an approach is critical for future space missions such as ACE and ACCP, and will allow aerosol microphysics vertical-profiles, particularly for absorption properties. To fulfill this objective we divide the goals in:
1. Study of capabilities of the joint inversion through new mathematical developments and sensitivity test analyses.
2. Evaluation of the GRASP joint inversion from field campaign data and their advantages over the classical stand-alone 3β+2α lidar inversion.
3. Exploring merging data of different satellite missions for implementing GRASP joint inversion.
4. Defining synergies in ground-based networks for the evaluation of aerosol microphysics satellite products.
The achievement of all these scientific objectives have permitted large advances in GRASP algorithm that have permitted the company GRASP-SAS to expand their business and growth. Also, all the achievements have permitted an advance in space sciences by delimiting the capabilities of the sensors and facilities synergies. Aerosol science have been also benefit by improving the retrieval capabilities of aerosol properties through GRASP algorithm.
All these research activities were carried out by the staff of the different institutions that formed the consortium created for the Marie Curie RISE call. The consortium was inter-sectorial and we implemented more than 85% of the secondments initially planned. The consortium overcome exceptional situations such as the COVID-19 pandemia or the war in Ukraine.
We organized an international workshop related to the project with the attendance of more of than 100 prestigious scientists. After that, the second GRASP summer school was organized with the attendance of international students.
