Retrieving aerosol microphysical properties by Lidar-Radiometer Inversion Code (LIRIC) for different aerosol types Granados-Muñoz, María José Guerrero-Rascado, Juan Luis Bravo-Aranda, Juan Antonio Navas-Guzmán, Francisco Valenzuela, Antonio Lyamani, Hassan Chaikovsky, A. Wandinger, Ulla Ansmann, Albert Dubovik, Oleg Grudo, J. O. Alados-Arboledas, Lucas This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through projects CGL2008-01330-E/CLI (Spanish and Portuguese Lidar Network), CGL2010-18782, and CSD2007-00067; by the Andalusian Regional Government through projects P10-RNM-6299 and P12-RNM-2409 and by EU through ACTRIS project (EU INFRA-2010-1.1.16- 262254). Granados-Muñoz was funded under grant AP2009-0552. The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise, and assistance provided by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center for the BSC-DREAM8b model dust data. The authors express gratitude to the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory for the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model. We also thank those at the NRL-Monterey that helped in the development of the NAAPS model and to the MODIS team for the use of FIRMS data. Finally, the authors thank to Sierra Nevada National Park for the support in the maintenance of the Sun photometer station at Cerro Poyos. LIRIC (Lidar-Radiometer Inversion Code) is applied to combined lidar and Sun photometer data from Granada station corresponding to different case studies. The main aim of this analysis is to evaluate the stability of LIRIC output volume concentration profiles for different aerosol types, loadings, and vertical distributions of the atmospheric aerosols. For this purpose, in a first part, three case studies corresponding to different atmospheric situations are analyzed to study the influence of the user-defined input parameters in LIRIC when varied in a reasonable range. Results evidence the capabilities of LIRIC to retrieve vertical profiles of microphysical properties during daytime by the combination of the lidar and the Sun photometer systems in an automatic and self-consistent way. However, spurious values may be obtained in the lidar incomplete overlap region depending on the structure of the aerosol layers. In a second part, the use of a second Sun photometer located in Cerro Poyos, in the same atmospheric column as Granada but at higher altitude, allowed us to obtain LIRIC retrievals from two different altitudes with independent Sun photometer measurements in order to check the self-consistency and robustness of the method. Retrievals at both levels are compared, providing a very good agreement (differences below 5 μm3/cm3) in those cases with the same aerosol type in the whole atmospheric column. However, some assumptions such as the height independency of parameters (sphericity, size distribution, or refractive index, among others) need to be carefully reviewed for those cases with the presence of aerosol layers corresponding to different types of atmospheric aerosols. 2025-01-28T09:26:23Z 2025-01-28T09:26:23Z 2014-04-01 journal article Granados-Muñoz, M. J., et al. (2014), Retrieving aerosol microphysical prop- erties by Lidar-Radiometer Inversion Code (LIRIC) for different aerosol types, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 119, doi:10.1002/ 2013JD021116. https://hdl.handle.net/10481/100684 10.1002/2013JD021116 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional American Geophysical Union