A251-07
Long-lived smoke clouds from the Australian megafires measured over Lauder, New Zealand

Thursday, 17 December 2020: 04:18
Virtual
Richard Querel1, Dan Smale1, Ben Liley1, Luke Oman2, Gerald E Nedoluha3, Tetsu Sakai4, Tomohiro Nagai4, Osamu Uchino5, Isamu Morino5, Jean-Paul Vernier6, Hyundeok Choi6, Larry Willis Thomason7, Travis N Knepp7, Jos de Laat8 and Ryan M Stauffer9, (1)National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA), Lauder, New Zealand, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC, United States, (4)Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan, (5)Nat.Inst. for Environ. Studies, Tsukuba, Japan, (6)National Institute of Aerospace, Hampton, VA, United States, (7)NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States, (8)Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Satellite Observations, De Bilt, 3730, Netherlands, (9)Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Abstract:
During January and February 2020, smoke from the Australian megafires drifted over Lauder, New Zealand. Some of the smoke was measured at Lauder within days, while other pyrocumulus smoke clouds continued over and back across the Pacific before passing over Lauder again weeks after leaving Australia. We present: in situ trace gas data from the early smoke periods; ozonesonde profiles from balloons launched directly into a 50-day-old smoke cloud, then lofted to 25-30 km altitude by radiative heating of absorbing aerosol (reporting extremely low ozone in the cloud and a temperature dipole across it); stratospheric water vapour retrievals from a microwave radiometer (showing high abundance); N2O and CO from FTIR measurements (both showing high abundance); and aerosol LIDAR retrievals (confirming the vertical position of the smoke cloud). These ground-based measurements agree with the space-based aerosol, temperature and trace gas estimates from MLS, CALIPSO, GOME-2 and TROPOMI.
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