Aerosol distributions demonstrating the working system for the assimilation of satellite aerosol observations on European and global scales

A model system for the assimilation of satellite observations of aerosol optical depth has been developed based on the global aerosol chemistry transport model TM4.

Section 1 of this report describes the aerosol chemistry model and section 2 the implemented assimilation scheme and the aerosol optical parameters. Observations of aerosol optical depth retrieved from the ATSR-2 instrument and provided by TNO-D&V were used to evaluate the assimilation system. Section 3 describes these ATSR-2 satellite observations and the way observational and model errors were estimated using independent observations from AERONET. Section 4 shows the assimilated aerosol distributions demonstrating the performance of the assimilation system, including a comparison to ground-based observations from Europe and from the Indian Ocean experiment (INDOEX).