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During the months of July-August 2007 NASA conducted a research campaign called the Tropical Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling (TC4) experiment. Vertical profiles of ozone were measured daily using an instrument known as an ozonesonde, which is attached to a weather balloon and launch to altitudes in excess of 30 km. These ozone profiles were measured over coastal Las Tablas, Panama (7.8N, 80W) and several times per week at Alajuela, Costa Rica (ION, 84W). Meteorological systems in the form of waves, detected most prominently in 100- 300 in thick ozone layer in the tropical tropopause layer, occurred in 50% (Las Tablas) and 40% (Alajuela) of the soundings. These layers, associated with vertical displacements and classified as gravity waves ("GW," possibly Kelvin waves), occur with similar stricture and frequency over the Paramaribo (5.8N, 55W) and San Cristobal (0.925, 90W) sites of the Southern Hemisphere Additional Ozonesondes (SHADOZ) network. The gravity wave labeled layers in individual soundings correspond to cloud outflow as indicated by the tracers measured from the NASA DC-8 and other aircraft data, confirming convective initiation of equatorial waves. Layers representing quasi-horizontal displacements, referred to as Rossby waves, are robust features in soundings from 23 July to 5 August. The features associated with Rossby waves correspond to extra-tropical influence, possibly stratospheric, and sometimes to pollution transport. Comparison of Las Tablas and Alajuela ozone budgets with 1999-2007 Paramaribo and San Cristobal soundings shows that TC4 is typical of climatology for the equatorial Americas. Overall during TC4, convection and associated meteorological waves appear to dominate ozone transport in the tropical tropopause layer.

An important cloud optical property derived from elastic backscatter lidars is depolarization ratio because it is used to determine cloud phase. Statistics and trends of volume depolarization ratio were analyzed for four years, 2003–2007, of Cloud Physics Lidar data during five projects of varying geographic locations and meteorological seasons. The volume depolarization ratio was computed using the parallel and perpendicular polarized 1064 nm channels. The majority of the cloud layers yielded a volume depolarization ratio between 0.3 and 0.6 with the volume depolarization ratio frequency distribution centered at 0.45 for ice clouds and 0.05 for water clouds. On average for ice clouds, volume depolarization ratio increased significantly as temperatures decreased. No trend for water clouds was observed, since all water particles are in theory spherical.

[1] Cloud and aerosol effects have a significant impact on the atmospheric radiation budget in the tropical Atlantic because of the spatial and temporal extent of desert dust and smoke from biomass burning in the atmosphere. The influences of African dust and smoke aerosols on cloud radiative properties over the tropical Atlantic Ocean were analyzed for the month of July for 3 years (2006–2008) using colocated data collected by the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) and Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments on the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) and Aqua satellites. Aerosol layer height and type can be accurately determined using CALIOP data through directly measured parameters such as optical depth, volume depolarization ratio, attenuated backscatter, and color ratio. On average, clouds below 5 km had a daytime instantaneous shortwave (SW) radiative flux of 270.2 ± 16.9 W/m2 and thin cirrus clouds had a SW radiative flux of 208.0 ± 12.7 W/m2. When dust aerosols interacted with clouds below 5 km, as determined from CALIPSO, the SW radiative flux decreased to 205.4 ± 13.0 W/m2. Similarly, smoke aerosols decreased the SW radiative flux of low clouds to a value of 240.0 ± 16.6 W/m2. These decreases in SW radiative flux were likely attributed to the aerosol layer height and changes in cloud microphysics. CALIOP lidar observations, which more accurately identify aerosol layer height than passive instruments, appear essential for better understanding of cloud-aerosol interactions, a major uncertainty in predicting the climate system.

[1] The origin of ozone over the summertime contiguous United States during summer 2004 was examined using the Intercontinental Transport Experiment (INTEX-A) Ozonesonde Network Study (IONS-04) over North America. We estimate the budget using the global chemistry transport Model of Ozone and Related Tracers version 4 (MOZART-4) with synthetic tracers that keep track of the ozone produced from selected NOx sources (stratosphere, lightning, anthropogenic, and biomass burning sources in Eurasia and the contiguous United States, and North American boreal fires). This “model budget” is analyzed in conjunction with results from a “laminar identification method” (LID), a more empirical approach to extracting information about contributions from ozone transported down from the stratosphere, advection, and convection. Both methods give comparable results for the contribution from stratospheric ozone, an average over all sites of 20 ± 7% for the LID budget and of 26 ± 6% for the model budget (the standard deviation gives the variability over the IONS sites). These results point toward the important contribution of downward transport of ozone from the stratosphere in assessing tropospheric ozone. The contributions for the other tracers are 25 ± 9% for U.S. sources, 13 ± 5% for Eurasian sources, 3 ± 2% for boreal fires and 10 ± 2% from lightning. In the boundary layer the dominant contribution generally comes from local (U.S.) sources. Eurasian sources can add up to 8% on average for some sites, lightning up to 4%, and North American boreal fires up to 10%. Variations in the tracer contributions across the different sites can be large, but the budget estimated by the model for the entire United States is similar to the budget averaged over the IONS-04 sites which lets us conclude that the sample of locations and launch days conveys a proper representation of the large-scale picture.