Vertical structure of a springtime smoky and humid troposphere over the southeast Atlantic from aircraft and reanalysis

Pistone, Kristina; Wilcox, Eric M.; Zuidema, Paquita; Giordano, Marco; Podolske, James; LeBlanc, Samuel E.; Kacenelenbogen, Meloë; Howell, Steven G.; Freitag, Steffen

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-7983-2024

Articles | Volume 24, issue 13

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-7983-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

New observations and related modelling studies of the aerosol–cloud–climate...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-7983-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 13

Research article

|

12 Jul 2024

Research article |

| 12 Jul 2024

Vertical structure of a springtime smoky and humid troposphere over the southeast Atlantic from aircraft and reanalysis

Kristina Pistone, Eric M. Wilcox, Paquita Zuidema, Marco Giordano, James Podolske, Samuel E. LeBlanc, Meloë Kacenelenbogen, Steven G. Howell, and Steffen Freitag

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-7983-2024-supplement

Data sets

Suite of Aerosol, Cloud, and Related Data Acquired Aboard P3 During ORACLES 2016, Version 1 ORACLES Science Team https://doi.org/10.5067/Suborbital/ORACLES/P3/2016_V1

Suite of Aerosol, Cloud, and Related Data Acquired Aboard P3 During ORACLES 2017, Version 1 ORACLES Science Team https://doi.org/10.5067/Suborbital/ORACLES/P3/2017_V1

Suite of Aerosol, Cloud, and Related Data Acquired Aboard P3 During ORACLES 2018, Version 1 ORACLES Science Team https://doi.org/10.5067/Suborbital/ORACLES/P3/2018_V1

Complete ERA5 from 1940: Fifth generation of ECMWF atmospheric reanalyses of the global climate H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.143582cf

The CAMS reanalysis of atmospheric composition (https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cams-global-reanalysis-eac4) Antje Inness et al. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-3515-2019

Model code and software

4STAR_codes: 4STAR processing codes (v1.0.1) 4STAR Team et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1492912

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Short summary

The springtime southeast Atlantic atmosphere contains lots of smoke from continental fires. This smoke travels with water vapor; more smoke means more humidity. We use aircraft observations and models to describe how the values change through the season and over the region. We sort the atmosphere into different types by vertical structure and amount of smoke and humidity. Since our work shows how frequently these components coincide, it helps to better quantify heating effects over this region.