A comprehensive, global aerosol picture can be generated using modern high-performance computing, geospatial statistics, assimilation, and data mining approaches.
The past decade has produced a remarkable increase in the amount of atmospheric data from observations and models, but these data are acquired or generated with nonuniform spatial and temporal sampling, scales, and coverage. The challenge for research into complex phenomena such as aerosol-climate interaction is to combine these disparate data into an integrated whole (Kahn and Braverman 1999;Huang et al. 2002). The ultimate goal is to establish a complete dataset that will effectively confront and constrain ever more realistic global three-dimensional models.A first step in attaining this objective is to produce a measurement-based description of global tropo-
AFFILIATIONS: ACKERMAN-Pacific