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Science Lecture by Jacek Chowdhary |
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Date: December 14, 2005
Time: 2:00pm
Location: NIA, Rm 137
An Introduction to the 2008 NASA/Glory Mission and to Its Capabilities to Retrieve Aerosol and Cloud Properties
Jacek Chowdhary, Columbia University
Tropospheric aerosols play a crucial role in climate and can cause a climate forcing directly by absorbing and reflecting sunlight, thereby cooling or heating the atmosphere, and indirectly by modifying cloud properties. The indirect aerosol effect may include increased cloud brightness, as aerosols lead to a larger number of smaller cloud droplets, and increased cloud cover, as smaller droplets inhibit rainfall and increase cloud lifetime. Both forcings are poorly understood and may represent the largest sources of uncertainty about future climate change. The 2008 NASA/Glory mission aims at reducing these uncertainties by obtaining multiangle, multispectral photo-polarimetric observations of the Earth, and by inverting these space-borne observations into unprecedented accurate retrievals of aerosol and cloud properties. This talk provides an introduction to the features, objectives, and instruments of this mission, and presents results from various field experiments conducted with an airborne prototype of its polarimeter.
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