Dust Observations and Climatology - Mineral Dust: A Key Player in the Earth System - page 165

Fig. 7.8 To p : time series of summer mean Barbados surface dust concentrations ( solid triangles )
along with the Sahelian Annual Drought Index ( crosses ) from 1966 to 2000. Bottom : time series
of summer mean Barbados surface dust concentrations ( solid triangles ) and summer mean satellite
DOD over the tropical North Atlantic (15-30 ı N, open circles from TOMS, shaded circles from
Meteosat/VIS) and over the Sahel (15-17 ı N, squares ) (From Chiapello et al. 2005 )

7.3.4 Vertical Structure

In recent years, the development and advancements of lidar (light detection and
ranging) techniques, either ground-based or from space (Table 7.2 ), have been
providing an unprecedented view of the vertical structure of the mineral dust distri-
bution. The earliest investigations of dust vertical repartition were performed in the
1970s through limited aircraft measurements, especially during field campaigns in
the North Atlantic region (Prospero and Carlson 1972 ). The first lidar observations
of dust from space were provided by the Lidar In-Space Technology Experiment
(LITE) and the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS, on the ICEsat), but
only for limited time periods (Karyampudi et al. 1999 ;Hartetal. 2005 ). Today an
increasing number of lidar measurements are available from both field campaigns
(AMMA, Léon et al. 2009 ; Cavalieri et al. 2010 ) and ground-based networks
(Papayannis et al. 2008 ) and from the CALIPSO mission, the first satellite involving
a lidar specifically designed to study aerosols and clouds (Winker et al. 2010 ).
The CALIOP lidar on board the CALIPSO, thanks to depolarization measurements,
enables aerosol classification, including identification of nonspherical particles such