Three years of measurements of aerosol vertical profiles (2007)(2008)(2009) made at the lidar station of L'Aquila, a site in central Italy that is part of the European Aerosol Research Lidar Network, are studied by means of well-tested radiative transfer models to analyze the radiative impact of mineral dust aerosols transported from the Sahara desert. Sixteen major episodes of desert dust transport are considered; the radiative analysis is conducted in terms of diurnal averages of the top-of-atmosphere radiative flux changes (TOARFC) with respect to a reference "clean" aerosol profile not perturbed by long-range transported desert particles. The aerosol size distribution, needed as an input parameter for the Mie scattering program to obtain single-scattering albedo, asymmetry parameter, and extinction scaling over the whole wavelength spectrum, is obtained from simultaneous surface measurements with a multichannel aerosol spectrometer. The calculated average net TOARFC is +2.3 and +3.0 W/m 2 in clear-and total-sky conditions, respectively.
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