Columnar heating rate and radiative effects of dust aerosols using 20 years of lidar observations.

The uncertainties of the Earth-atmosphere energy budget are associated with a poor understanding of direct and indirect aerosol effects. Dust is a mixture of different minerals, and its chemical and microphysical properties change during transport. Therefore, the influence of dust aerosols on radiative effects is characterized by great uncertainty. Due to meteorological atmospheric patterns, aerosol intrusions are very frequent in the Mediterranean, which is a climatic hot spot and where climate change is much stronger than in other parts of the world. In this study, we analyzed and assessed long-term trends of the surface and columnar heating rate and the radiative effects of dust aerosols using lidar observations. These measurements were taken in the framework of the European Aerosol Research Lidar Network (EARLINET) at Istituto di Metodologie per l'Analisi Ambientale (IMAA) with the Raman/elastic lidar MUSA (40°36′N, 15°44′E). The radiative transfer model Fu–Liou–Gu (FLG) was used to solve aerosol (no clouds) radiative fluxes, with aerosol extinction coefficient profiles from lidar observations as input data. All the cases of dust intrusion that occurred in the last twenty years were selected to understand how they affected the Earth-atmosphere radiative budget, both at the surface and at the top-of-the-atmosphere. In the future, these studies will be important for improving the accuracy of climate predictions.