Analysis of Sararan Dust Observations by Calipso in the Context of CRAM

Since its first collection of lidar data in June of 2006, the Cloud Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) lidar instrument aboard CALIPSO has observed numerous Saharan dust events in Western Africa and the Atlantic, predominantly during the boreal summer months of late May through early September. A tremendous amount of data is currently available from which to begin analysis. With CALIOP´s sensitivity to polarization at 532 nm, such dust layers are easily identified by significant amounts of depolarization relative to other aerosol types due to the non-sphericity of dust particles. Dust aerosols represent an interesting basis upon which to examine the performance of the CRAM technique, and in particular its dust model, due to the fact that dust is distinctly identifiable from depolarization. The results from this analysis aim to demonstrate the capability of aerosol modeling as a solution to the retrieval problem, where independent verification of aerosol type (i.e., from 532 nm depolarization and known dust transport paths) may be made to facilitate the investigation.