Thesis of Yuyang Chang

Defense of thesis Yuyang Chang - laboratory LOA

Abstract :

Vertical information on aerosol optical and microphysical properties is of significant importance to study aerosol evolution, transport, as well as their impacts on human health, local environment and global climate. This thesis developed an algorithm, the Basic algOrithm for REtrieval of Aerosol with Lidar (BOREAL), for retrieving heigh-resolved aerosol microphysical properties from combinations of extinction, backscattering and depolarization lidar measurements. Based on maximum likelihood estimation, the retrieval algorithm uses a nonlinear iteration approach to search for the best fit to both measurements and constraints. The retrieved aerosol microphysical properties include particle size distribution, volume concentration, effective radius, complex refractive index (CRI) and single scattering albedo (SSA).
The performance of BOREAL, retrieval accuracy and measurement sensitivity are assessed through simulated data. In general, retrieval accuracy is higher for fine-mode particles than coarse-mode particles. The simulations demonstrate the importance of exploiting a priori constraint to improve the retrieval accuracy of CRI and SSA. Apart from spherical particles, performance of retrieving non-spherical particles is also evaluated by integrating three different particle scattering models, i.e., the Sphere, Spheroid and Irregular-Hexahedral (IH) models, into BOREAL. The results show incorporating depolarization measurements into inversion is essential to better constrain and stabilize the retrieval. Besides, approximating non-spherical particles to spheres will evidently degrade retrieval quality in cases of lidar measurements. In addition, BOREAL is applied to real lidar observations of different aerosol types, including biomass burning, dust and continental polluted aerosols at the ATOLL observatory. Results are analyzed and compared with retrievals from AERONET and previous studies, which demonstrates the robustness of BOREAL for real data application and aerosol characterization.
Overall, this work contributes to Labex CaPPA and ACTRIS efforts to better quantify aerosol microphysical properties using lidar measurements.

Keywords : atmospheric aerosol,remote sensing,inverse problem,lidar measurements,aerosol microphysical properties,BOREAL