3D OMI observations of aerosol plumes released from December 2006 Australian forest fires

摘要

In the December 2006 severe forest fires raged in south east Australia. We used the OMI instrument to study the transport of the aerosols emitted by these fires. On 14 December a freshly released plume was lofted by a passing weather system to high altitudes in the atmosphere and was transported around the planet in 10 days. We used the OMI cloud product to retrieve the altitude of the aerosol plume, 8-10km. We compare our findings to CALIPSO observations of the same plume, which yields 11-14km. We performed radiative transfer calculations to investigate the sensitivity of the OMI cloud algorithm to the plume altitude.