Articles | Volume 16, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-1587-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-1587-2016
Research article
 | 
11 Feb 2016
Research article |  | 11 Feb 2016

Remote sensing of soot carbon – Part 2: Understanding the absorption Ångström exponent

G. L. Schuster, O. Dubovik, A. Arola, T. F. Eck, and B. N. Holben

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Cited articles

Adachi, K., Chung, S., and Buseck, P.: Shapes of soot aerosol particles and implications for their effects on climate, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D15206, https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD012868, 2010.
Andreae, M.: Aerosols before pollution, Science, 315, 50–51, 2006.
Andreae, M. O. and Gelencsér, A.: Black carbon or brown carbon? The nature of light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosols, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 6, 3131–3148, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-6-3131-2006, 2006.
Arola, A., Schuster, G., Myhre, G., Kazadzis, S., Dey, S., and Tripathi, S. N.: Inferring absorbing organic carbon content from AERONET data, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 215–225, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-11-215-2011, 2011.
Bahadur, R., Praveen, P., Xu, Y., and Ramanathan, V.: Solar absorption by elemental and brown carbon determined from spectral observations, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 109, 17366–17371, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1205910109, 2012.
Short summary
Some authors have recently suggested that the spectral dependence of aerosol absorption may be used to separate soot carbon absorption from the aerosol absorption associated with organic carbon and dust. We demonstrate that this approach is inconsistent with the underlying assumptions that are required to infer aerosol absorption through remote sensing techniques, and that carbonaceous aerosols can not be differentiated from dust by exclusively using spectral absorption signatures.
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