Modelling spatio-temporal mismatch for Aerosol profiles

In this chapter the horizontal smoothing impact on the uncertainty term between the satellite and the ground measurement of the aerosol layers is investigated. Nine different horizontal averaging schemes for the CALIPSO aerosol profiles are used in order to investigate the influence of horizontal smoothing of CALIPSO data when compared against the EARLINET data. In a first analysis we search for the best horizontal smoothing for CALIOP considering the whole column of aerosol from the ground to the free troposphere, in 5 different sites. To take into account the differences in the vertical dimension and to exploit the vertical profiling capability of both EARLINET and CALIPSO, we split the atmosphere into three zones: as representative of local aerosol conditions, the middle troposphere with transport of aerosols and free troposphere. In a second step, we investigate the impact of horizontal smoothing in the three vertical zone.