Dust Radiative Effects

Project title: Retrieval of Spectrally-Resolved Dust Direct Radiative Effects over Desert Regions from Hyperspectral Observations of EMIT Mission

Mineral dust is one of the most abundant types of atmospheric aerosols in terms of dry mass. Dust directly interacts with both solar shortwave (SW) and thermal infrared (IR) longwave (LW) radiation and thereby influences the Earth’s radiative energy budget, which is known as the direct radiative effects (DRE) of dust. Despite significant progress made over the last few decades, there are still significant uncertainties in both model- and observation-based estimates of dust DRE, which are particularly large in the desert regions. NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission launched in 2022 provides unique hyperspectral observations that cover most of the solar spectrum (381 nm to 2493 nm) and corresponding surface reflectance retrievals over the dust source regions. The surface soil mineralogy retrievals from EMIT will soon help the Earth System Models (ESMs) improve their dust DRE simulations. The proposed research is motivated to provide a unique observation-based, spectrally-resolved clear-sky SW dust DRE at the top of atmosphere (TOA) in the desert regions based on a novel method enabled by the hyperspectral observations of EMIT instrument. The retrieved dust DRESW will provide a valuable independent dataset for model evaluations and studies of dust’s multifaceted roles in the climate systems.

Project Team

	Zhibo Zhang
	University of Maryland Baltimore County	Zhibo.zhang@umbc.edu https://acros.umbc.edu/people/zhibo-zhang/
	Yujie Wang
	University of Maryland Baltimore County, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center	yujie@umbc.edu
	Alexei I. Lyapustin
	NASA Goddard Space Flight Center	Alexei.I.Lyapustin@nasa.gov
	David R. Thompson
	Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology	David.r.thompson@jpl.nasa.gov
	Qianqian Song
	University of Maryland Baltimore County	cd11735@umbc.edu