High-resolution optical constants of crystalline ammonium nitrate for infrared remote sensing of the Asian Tropopause Aerosol Layer

Abstract

Abstract. Infrared spectroscopic observations have shown that crystalline ammonium nitrate (AN) particles are an abundant constituent of the upper tropospheric aerosol layer which is formed during the Asian summer monsoon period, the so-called Asian Tropopause Aerosol Layer (ATAL). At upper tropospheric temperatures, the thermodynamically stable phase of AN is different from that at 298 K, meaning that presently available room-temperature optical constants of AN, that is, the real and imaginary parts of the complex refractive index, cannot be applied for the quantitative analysis of these infrared measurements. In this work, we have retrieved the first low-temperature data set of optical constants for crystalline AN in the 800–6000 cm−1 wavenumber range with a spectral resolution of 0.5 cm−1. The optical constants were iteratively derived from an infrared extinction spectrum of 1 micrometer-sized AN particles suspended in a cloud chamber at 223 K. The uncertainties of the new data set were carefully assessed in a comprehensive sensitivity analysis. We show that our data accurately fit aircraft-borne infrared measurements of ammonium nitrate particles in the ATAL.

Lower-stratospheric aerosol measurements in eastward-shedding vortices over Japan from the Asian summer monsoon anticyclone during the summer of 2018

“…The possible influence of volcanic eruptions and wildfire events is investigated using two satellite aerosol particle datasets, one providing vertical extinction profile data at 675 nm from the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Limb Profiler (LP), level 2 version 1.5 (Chen et al, 2018), and the other attenuated scattering ratio data from the CALIOP on board the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite (Thomason et al, 2007;Winker et al, 2007Winker et al, , 2010. CALIOP level 3 monthly mean stratospheric aerosol data (CAL_LID_L3_Stratospheric_APro-Standard-V1-00) are used in this study; in this data product, clouds and polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) have been removed based on the information of particulate extinction-to-backscatter (lidar) ratio and the multiple-scattering factor profile (Young and Vaughan, 2009;Kim et al, 2018; https://www-calipso.larc.…”