ICAROHS Technical Note 2; Selection and validation of ICAROHS scenes

Technical Note #2 describes the scenes selected from available measurement data sets for simulations with the EarthCARE simulator ECSIM and presents validation results.

For simulation with the EarthCARE simulator ECSIM, several scenes were selected from data sets gathered with the DLR Falcon research aircraft during field experiments in 1998 (LACE), 2006 (SAMUM-1), 2008 (SAMUM-2 and EUCAARI) and 2010 (VOLCANO). Altogether, data from 37 flight days with about 56 vertical profile cases are available. We used the following criteria, to select scenes from this comprehensive data set:

- As many different aerosol types as possible (mineral dust, aged mineral dust, biomass burning aerosol from boreal and tropical fires, anthropogenic pollution, volcanic ash, and marine aerosol).
- HSRL profile available (For the case of the volcanic ash, no HSRL data are available since the HSRL was not employed during the volcanic ash missions. However, data from an airborne wind lidar are available.).
- In-situ sequences representative for the aerosol distribution in the vertical column
Ground-based lidar data available

Applying the defined criteria for data selection, the following scenes were selected:
Mineral dust: 3 cases (SAMUM-1, 2006)
Aged dust & tropical biomass burning aerosol (layered structure): 2 cases (SAMUM-2, 2008)
Tropical biomass burning aerosol: 1 case (SAMUM-2, 2008)
Anthropogenic pollution: 3 cases (EUCAARI, 2008)
Marine aerosol & anthropogenic pollution (layered structure): 1 case (EUCAARI, 2008)
Volcanic ash: 1 case (Eyjafajllajökull, 2010)