How remote sensing can facilitate desert dust research

Atmospheric remote sensing from space and surface has been advanced during the last decade. Mineral dust is an atmospheric target that provides a strong signature on active and passive polarimetric remote sensing observations, due to its irregular shape. Nowadays, advanced lidar systems operating in the framework of ACTRIS provide quality assured, calibrated multi-wavelength linear particle depolarization ratio measurements, while new developments will provide us elliptical polarization recordings in the near future. Passive polarimeters are already part of ACTRIS and AERONET and their integration in operational algorithms is expected in the near future. This wealth of new information combined with updated scattering databases and sophisticated inversion schemes provide the means towards an improved characterization of desert dust in the future. This kind of information can be used for space-borne lidars such as CALIPSO, CATS, Aeolus, EarthCARE and the future AOS missions.

We present here some examples of how remote sensing facilitates desert dust research during the last decade, aiming to demonstrate the progress on issues such as: (a) the discrimination of desert dust in external mixtures, (b) the estimation of the fine and coarse particle modes, (c) the synergy of passive and active remote sensing for the derivation of dust optical properties, (d) the provision of dust-related CCN and IN particle concentrations for aerosol-cloud interaction studies, (e) the development of new scattering databases based on realistic particle shapes, (e) the application of these techniques on space lidar datasets for the provision of climatological datasets, and (f) the use of these datasets in data assimilation for improving dust representations in models.