This paper presents validation results of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Integrated Forecasting System MACC (Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate) ...re-analysis aerosol optical depth (AOD) for the period 2003-2006. We evaluate the MACC AOD at a UV wavelength (340 nm) and at mid-visible (500 and 550 nm) by comparing against ground-based AERONET measurements at 12 sites. The AERONET sites cover various parts of the globe and are categorized in three groups: urban/anthropogenic, biomass burning and dust, depending on the typically dominating aerosol type. This is the first time a global model such as the ECMWF has been evaluated for the performance of AOD at a UV wavelength. The results show that the MACC system generally provides a good representation of the AOD on a monthly basis, showing a realistic seasonal cycle. The model is mostly able to capture major dust load events and also the peak months of biomass burning correctly. For Kanpur and Solar Village, however, the model overestimates the AOD during the monsoon period when the aerosol load is generally low. When comparing hourly AOD values, the model-measurement agreement is better for biomass burning and dust sites than for urban sites, with an average correlation coefficient around 0.90 for biomass burning sites, around 0.77 for dust sites, and below 0.70 for urban sites. The AOD at 500 nm averaged over all sites shows only a small systematic difference between modeled and measured values, with a relative mean bias of 0.02. However, for the AOD at 340 nm the relative mean bias is -0.2. All sites included in the study show a relative mean bias at 340 nm smaller (or more negative) than that at 500 nm, indicating a strong wavelength dependence in the performance of the AOD in the MACC system. A comparison against fine and coarse mode AOD of the AERONET indicates that this has to do with the size distribution of the model: generally, the ECMWF model overestimates the contribution by coarse mode particles.
TEMPO was selected in 2012 by NASA as the first Earth Venture Instrument, for launch between 2018 and 2021. It will measure atmospheric pollution for greater North America from space using ...ultraviolet and visible spectroscopy. TEMPO observes from Mexico City, Cuba, and the Bahamas to the Canadian oil sands, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, hourly and at high spatial resolution (~2.1km N/S×4.4km E/W at 36.5°N, 100°W). TEMPO provides a tropospheric measurement suite that includes the key elements of tropospheric air pollution chemistry, as well as contributing to carbon cycle knowledge. Measurements are made hourly from geostationary (GEO) orbit, to capture the high variability present in the diurnal cycle of emissions and chemistry that are unobservable from current low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that measure once per day. The small product spatial footprint resolves pollution sources at sub-urban scale. Together, this temporal and spatial resolution improves emission inventories, monitors population exposure, and enables effective emission-control strategies.
TEMPO takes advantage of a commercial GEO host spacecraft to provide a modest cost mission that measures the spectra required to retrieve ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), formaldehyde (H2CO), glyoxal (C2H2O2), bromine monoxide (BrO), IO (iodine monoxide), water vapor, aerosols, cloud parameters, ultraviolet radiation, and foliage properties. TEMPO thus measures the major elements, directly or by proxy, in the tropospheric O3 chemistry cycle. Multi-spectral observations provide sensitivity to O3 in the lowermost troposphere, substantially reducing uncertainty in air quality predictions. TEMPO quantifies and tracks the evolution of aerosol loading. It provides these near-real-time air quality products that will be made publicly available. TEMPO will launch at a prime time to be the North American component of the global geostationary constellation of pollution monitoring together with the European Sentinel-4 (S4) and Korean Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) instruments.
•TEMPO is under development to collect geostationary air quality measurements.•TEMPO will measure every hour during daylight over greater North America.•TEMPO will have the spatial resolution to measure sub-urban variability.•The mission’s primary data products include tropospheric ozone and related species.•TEMPO’s time-resolved observations form a revolutionary data set for air quality.
We compare the variability properties of very high energy gamma-ray emitting BL Lac objects in the optical and radio bands. We use variability information to distinguish multiple emission components ...in the jet, to be used as a guidance for spectral energy distribution modelling. Our sample includes 32 objects in the northern sky for which we have data for at least two years in both bands. We use optical R-band data from the Tuorla blazar monitoring program and 15 GHz radio data from the Owens Valley Radio Observatory blazar monitoring program. We estimate the variability amplitudes using the intrinsic modulation index, and study the time-domain connection by cross-correlating the optical and radio light curves assuming power law power spectral density. Our sample objects are in general more variable in the optical than radio. We find correlated flares in about half of the objects, and correlated long-term trends in more than 40% of the objects. In these objects we estimate that at least 10−50% of the optical emission originates in the same emission region as the radio, while the other half is due to faster variations not seen in the radio. This implies that simple single-zone spectral energy distribution models are not adequate for many of these objects.
The diurnal variability of aerosol optical depth (AOD) can be significant, depending on location and dominant aerosol type. However, these diurnal cycles have rarely been taken into account in ...measurement-based estimates of aerosol direct radiative forcing (ADRF) or aerosol direct radiative effect (ADRE). The objective of our study was to estimate the influence of diurnal aerosol variability at the top of the atmosphere ADRE estimates. By including all the possible AERONET sites, we wanted to assess the influence on global ADRE estimates. While focusing also in more detail on some selected sites of strongest impact, our goal was to also see the possible impact regionally. We calculated ADRE with different assumptions about the daily AOD variability: taking the observed daily AOD cycle into account and assuming diurnally constant AOD. Moreover, we estimated the corresponding differences in ADREs, if the single AOD value for the daily mean was taken from the the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Terra or Aqua overpass times, instead of accounting for the true observed daily variability. The mean impact of diurnal AOD variability on 24 h ADRE estimates, averaged over all AERONET sites, was rather small and it was relatively small even for the cases when AOD was chosen to correspond to the Terra or Aqua overpass time. This was true on average over all AERONET sites, while clearly there can be much stronger impact in individual sites. Examples of some selected sites demonstrated that the strongest observed AOD variability (the strongest morning afternoon contrast) does not typically result in a significant impact on 24 h ADRE. In those cases, the morning and afternoon AOD patterns are opposite and thus the impact on 24 h ADRE, when integrated over all solar zenith angles, is reduced. The most significant effect on daily ADRE was induced by AOD cycles with either maximum or minimum AOD close to local noon. In these cases, the impact on 24 h ADRE was typically around 0.1–0.2 W m−2 (both positive and negative) in absolute values, 5–10% in relative ones.
Previous detections of individual astrophysical sources of neutrinos are limited to the Sun and the supernova 1987A, whereas the origins of the diffuse flux of high-energy cosmic neutrinos remain ...unidentified. On 22 September 2017, we detected a high-energy neutrino, IceCube-170922A, with an energy of ~290 tera-electron volts. Its arrival direction was consistent with the location of a known γ-ray blazar, TXS 0506+056, observed to be in a flaring state. An extensive multiwavelength campaign followed, ranging from radio frequencies to γ-rays. These observations characterize the variability and energetics of the blazar and include the detection of TXS 0506+056 in very-high-energy γ-rays. This observation of a neutrino in spatial coincidence with a γ-ray-emitting blazar during an active phase suggests that blazars may be a source of high-energy neutrinos.
In order to have a good estimate of the current forcing by anthropogenic aerosols, knowledge on past aerosol levels is needed. Aerosol optical depth (AOD) is a good measure for aerosol loading. ...However, dedicated measurements of AOD are only available from the 1990s onward. One option to lengthen the AOD time series beyond the 1990s is to retrieve AOD from surface solar radiation (SSR) measurements taken with pyranometers. In this work, we have evaluated several inversion methods designed for this task. We compared a look-up table method based on radiative transfer modelling, a non-linear regression method and four machine learning methods (Gaussian process, neural network, random forest and support vector machine) with AOD observations carried out with a sun photometer at an Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) site in Thessaloniki, Greece. Our results show that most of the machine learning methods produce AOD estimates comparable to the look-up table and non-linear regression methods. All of the applied methods produced AOD values that corresponded well to the AERONET observations with the lowest correlation coefficient value being 0.87 for the random forest method. While many of the methods tended to slightly overestimate low AODs and underestimate high AODs, neural network and support vector machine showed overall better correspondence for the whole AOD range. The differences in producing both ends of the AOD range seem to be caused by differences in the aerosol composition. High AODs were in most cases those with high water vapour content which might affect the aerosol single scattering albedo (SSA) through uptake of water into aerosols. Our study indicates that machine learning methods benefit from the fact that they do not constrain the aerosol SSA in the retrieval, whereas the LUT method assumes a constant value for it. This would also mean that machine learning methods could have potential in reproducing AOD from SSR even though SSA would have changed during the observation period.
The high-energy spectral energy distributions of blazars have been modelled many times, but none of the previous studies have started from synchrotron components derived from observations. The common ...approach has instead been to start with a one-component theoretical synchrotron spectrum, although it is well established both from observations and from theory that the synchrotron emission originates from several components: from a constant jet component and from shocks propagating downstream in the jet. Furthermore, the observed synchrotron flux variability appears to be entirely due to evolving shocks. In this paper we present the first attempt to model the synchrotron, and consequently also the inverse Compton, spectral energy distributions in a more realistic manner. Instead of assuming a single theoretical spectrum as the basis of modelling, we use a code based on the standard shocked jet framework to identify the spectra and the time evolution of both the jet and of the many shock components in 3C 279, one of the best-observed blazars. These semiempirical components, derived from extensive multifrequency monitoring, are then used to estimate the inverse Compton component produced by each component. Previous studies have shown that gamma-ray flaring occurs preferentially after a new mm-radio flare begins, or, equivalently, after a new VLBI shock component has separated from the core. Observed time delays indicate that the shock component is already well outside the broad line region when gamma-ray flaring occurs, casting doubt on the efficiency of external Compton mechanisms. We therefore apply our modelling to the synchrotron self-Compton scenario in order to estimate how large a fraction of the high energy flux during two EGRET observing periods could be explained by SSC radiation. We find that the X-ray flux during both a quiescent and a flaring stage of 3C 279 can be explained by SSC from the jet and from several shocks, but that the gamma-ray fluxes cannot.
We report on the Delta *g-ray activity of the high-synchrotron-peaked BL Lacertae object Markarian 421 (Mrk 421) during the first 1.5 years of Fermi operation, from 2008 August 5 to 2010 March 12. We ...find that the Large Area Telescope (LAT) Delta *g-ray spectrum above 0.3 GeV can be well described by a power-law function with photon index Delta *G = 1.78 ? 0.02 and average photon flux F(> 0.3 GeV) = (7.23 ? 0.16) X 10--8 ph cm--2 s--1. Over this time period, the Fermi-LAT spectrum above 0.3 GeV was evaluated on seven-day-long time intervals, showing significant variations in the photon flux (up to a factor ~3 from the minimum to the maximum flux) but mild spectral variations. The variability amplitude at X-ray frequencies measured by RXTE/ASM and Swift/BAT is substantially larger than that in Delta *g-rays measured by Fermi-LAT, and these two energy ranges are not significantly correlated. We also present the first results from the 4.5 month long multifrequency campaign on Mrk 421, which included the VLBA, Swift, RXTE, MAGIC, the F-GAMMA, GASP-WEBT, and other collaborations and instruments that provided excellent temporal and energy coverage of the source throughout the entire campaign (2009 January 19 to 2009 June 1). During this campaign, Mrk 421 showed a low activity at all wavebands. The extensive multi-instrument (radio to TeV) data set provides an unprecedented, complete look at the quiescent spectral energy distribution (SED) for this source. The broadband SED was reproduced with a leptonic (one-zone synchrotron self-Compton) and a hadronic model (synchrotron proton blazar). Both frameworks are able to describe the average SED reasonably well, implying comparable jet powers but very different characteristics for the blazar emission site.
In spring 2006, biomass burning aerosols from eastern Europe were transported extensively to Finland, and to other parts of northern Europe. They were observed as far as in the European Arctic. In ...the first part of this paper, temporal and spatial evolution and transport of these biomass burning aerosols are monitored with MODIS retrieved aerosol optical depth (AOD) imagery at visible wavelengths (0.55 μm). Comparison of MODIS and AERONET AOD is conducted at Tõravere, Estonia. Then trajectory analyses, as well as MODIS Fire Mapper products are used to better understand the type and origin of the air masses. During the studied four-week period AOD values ranged from near zero up to 1.2 at 0.55 μm and the linear correlation between MODIS and AERONET was very high (~0.97). Temporal variability observed within this four-week period was also rather well explained by the trajectory analysis in conjunction with the fire detections produced by the MODIS Rapid Response System. In the second part of our study, the surface measurements of global and UV radiation at Jokioinen, Finland are used to study the effect of this haze episode on the levels of surface radiation. We found reductions up to 35% in noon-time surface UV irradiance (at 340 nm) as compared to typical aerosol conditions. For global (total solar) radiation, the reduction was always smaller, in line with the expected wavelength dependence of the aerosol effect.
Synchrotron flaring in the jet of 3C 279 Lindfors, E. J.; Türler, M.; Valtaoja, E. ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
09/2006, Letnik:
456, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Aims.We study the synchrotron flaring behaviour of the blazar 3C 279 based on an extensive dataset covering 10 years of monitoring at 19 different frequencies in the radio-to-optical range. ...Methods.The properties of a typical outburst are derived from the observations by decomposing the 19 lightcurves into a series of self-similar events. This analysis is achieved by fitting all data simultaneously to a succession of outbursts defined according to the shock-in-jet model of Marscher & Gear (1985). Results.We compare the derived properties of the synchrotron outbursts in 3C 279 to those obtained with a similar method for the quasar 3C 273. It is argued that differences in the flaring behaviour of these two sources are intrinsic to the sources themselves rather than being due to orientation effects. We also compare the start times and flux densities of our modelled outbursts with those measured from radio components identified in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) images. We find VLBI counterparts for most of our model outbursts, although some high-frequency peaking events are not seen in the radio maps. Finally, we study the link between the appearance of a new synchrotron component and the EGRET gamma-ray state of the source at 10 different epochs. We find that an early-stage shock component is always present during high gamma-ray states, while in low gamma-ray states the time since the onset of the last synchrotron outburst is significantly longer. This statistically significant correlation supports the idea that gamma-ray flares are associated with the early stages of shock components propagating in the jet. We note, however, that the shock wave is already beyond the broad line region during the gamma-ray flaring.
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