S3-MAAP will be a vehicle for TTU students and researchers to intersect their career paths in national and international collaboration by providing a tremendous opportunity to learn and engage in NASA’s satellite and ground-based measurement validation efforts. Students will explore different data sets obtained at TTU site and other AERONET sites, and work on assignments including learning and extending their analytical skills and build their research credentials. Importantly, the academic experiences of the TTU scholars centered around S3-MAAP science themes will be enhanced as they will participate in annual workshops at TTU as well as complete their doctoral thesis work. S3-MAAP will finally enable scholars to demonstrate technical skills via acquiring and analyzing near-real time measurements as they become a part of bigger scientific community.

Further read...

In the rapidly changing climate regime of the 21st century, weather and climate phenomena are becoming less distinct, making the atmospheric processes a “continuum,” rather than a process of two separate time scales. Thus, one requires an improved understanding of the intricate connections and relationship among myriad ranges of weather and climate phenomena, for example, when severe precipitation events and natural disasters like droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and causing economic losses and finally affecting the long-term trends of those events (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC). Over the United States, overall costs due to weather and climate disasters from 1980–2019 exceeded $1.7 trillion. On the other hand, earth’s surface processes and adjacent atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) tie both weather and climate relevant processes between surface and large-scale atmosphere (i.e., free troposphere, FT) and acts as a short-term “memory” of land-atmosphere interactions on diurnal time-scales, governs the distributions of water vapor, aerosols, pollutants, and plays an important role in governing majority of the atmospheric and environmental processes taking place in the lower troposphere including convection initiation, severe precipitation events, aerosol pollution and aerosol optical depths (AOD), and turbulence mixing. Consequently, the dynamical and physicochemical processes taking place near surface, adjacent ABL, and overlying FT significantly impact all major atmospheric phenomenon and mechanisms taking place on the timescales of weather, climate, and the bridging timescale of both.

Among an extremely large number of weather and climate relevant processes and parameters, high-quality and high-resolution simulations of aerosol physicochemical properties and precipitation processes and the assessment of their uncertainties using high spatiotemporally resolved observations remained critical. For instance, according to both Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the IPCC, we found very low confidence level for the radiative forcing (RF) estimates associated with all types of aerosol-related processes including aerosol-radiation interactions, aerosol-cloud interactions, contrail-induced cirrus, etc. Additionally, level of scientific understanding (LOSU) for both aerosol-radiation and aerosol-cloud interactions remained either low or very low in both AR5 and AR6.

TTU AERONET SITE: Operational Since June 14, 2023