News
08/06/2019: Story on our recent grants from DoE and NASA in UMBC news
08/03/2019: Story on Qianqian's FINESST fellowship in UMBC news
04/15/2019: Out proposal to study the dust aerosols using CALIPSO has been selected for funding by NASA!
Our ARCOS team has won a major research grant from NASA to study dust aerosols from space. We will use observations from satellite instruments, including a space-borne lidar, to investigate whether dust aerosols are cooling or warming our planet.
The ACROS team is now recruiting a talented graduate student with numerical modeling skills to work on this project
12/05/2018: Our Recent JGR paper on the remote sensing of partly cloudy pixels is highlighted by AGU
https://eos.org/editor-highlights/improving-retrievals-for-partially-cloudy-pixels
Clear-sky contamination, where a pixel is only partially cloudy, is a challenging and long-standing issue when estimating cloud properties from satellite observations. Werner et al. [2018] demonstrate that if a pixel includes contributions from a darker surface the clouds appear thinner, while seemingly containing fewer and larger water droplets. However, many satellite instruments include a single channel with a higher horizontal resolution. The authors show that these observations can be used to estimate the different contributions from both the cloud and the surface within a pixel. As a result, only the cloudy part of a pixel is used to derive cloud properties. The techniques introduced in this study are validated for different satellite sensors, cloud types and observational conditions. These findings address common concerns about the quality of satellite observations over complex cloud fields and will greatly increase the reliability of the estimated cloud properties.
Citation: Werner, F., Zhang, Z., Wind, G., Miller, D. J., Platnick, S., & Di Girolamo, L. [2018]. Improving cloud optical property retrievals for partly cloudy pixels using coincident higher‐resolution single band measurements: A feasibility study using ASTER observations. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 123. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JD028902
—Zhanqing Li, Editor, JGR: Atmospheres
05/04/2018: Qianqian Song passed her Preliminary Proposal Defense. Congratulations! Qianqian.
03/05/2018: Our PNAS paper on the interactions between smoke and clouds in the SE Atlantic region hit the news!
See UMBC Press Release: https://news.umbc.edu/umbc-physicists-discover-unexpected-effect-of-african-wildfires-on-climate/
See Phys.org News: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-physicists-interactions-clouds-unexpected-cooling.html
10/13/2017: Dan Miller defended his Ph.D. Dissertation! Congratulations Dan!
09/15/2017: We win NSF funding for multi-disciplinary training in "Atmospheric Physics+Big Data and HPC" see PR
05/26/2017: Daniel Miller is selected as fellow of the prestigious NASA Postdoc Program (NPP)!
04/21/2017: ACORS group attended the first UMBC Earth Day Science Symposium
04/19/2017: Zhibo gave a talk at the 3rd A-Train Symposium
03/23/2017: Chamara submitted his first paper to Geophysical Research Letter (Good Luck!)
01/27/2017: Our new paper on ARM-MODIS cloud comparison over Azores site accepted by JGR
01/23/2017: Zhibo gave a talk on above-cloud smoke at the 2017 Annual AMS meeting
12/15/2016: Dan, Frank and Zhibo attended the AGU fall meeting at San Francisco
06/23/2016 Our recent JGR paper has been selected for Editor highlighting!
Insights into Long-Standing Bias in Cloud Property Retrieval
04/20/2016 Zhibo Zhang won the International Radiation Commission Young Scientist Award! A prestigious award usually given to a single young scientist in the field of Atmospheric Radiation every 4 years!
See Press Release below:
