Microphysical characterization of long-range transported biomass burning particles from North America at three EARLINET stations Ortiz Amezcua, Pablo Guerrero Rascado, Juan Luis Granados Muñoz, María José Benavent-Oltra, José Antonio Alados Arboledas, Lucas This work was supported by the Andalusia Regional Government through project P12-RNM-2409, by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through project CGL2013-45410-R and by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports through grant FPU14/03684. The financial support for EARLINET in the ACTRIS Research Infrastructure Project by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 654169 and previously under grant agreement no. 262254 in the 7th Framework Program (FP7/2007- 2013) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thankfully acknowledge the FEDER program for the instrumentation used in this work. This work was also partially funded by the University of Granada through the contract “Plan Propio. Programa 9. Convocatoria 2013” and through “Programa de Becas de Iniciación a la Investigación. Convocatoria 2014”. The Polish lidar development was financed by FNITP, Poland (grant no. 519/FNITP/115/2010). This work was supported by the SONATA-BIS project funded by NCN, Poland (grant no. 2012/05/E/ST10/01578). The authors express gratitude to the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model. We thank those at NRL–Monterey that have helped in the development of the NAAPS model and the MODIS team for the use of FIRMS data. Acknowledgements are also due for NASA–EOS team members for providing CALIOP and CALIPSO datasets. We acknowledge those members of the Granada, Leipzig and Belsk teams for maintaining and supporting the instruments from the AERONET network and B. Holben and the AERONET team for the use of the retrievals and data availability. Strong events of long-range transported biomass burning aerosol were detected during July 2013 at three EARLINET (European Aerosol Research Lidar Network) stations, namely Granada (Spain), Leipzig (Germany) and Warsaw (Poland). Satellite observations from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and CALIOP (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) instruments, as well as modeling tools such as HYSPLIT (Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) and NAAPS (Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System), have been used to estimate the sources and transport paths of those North American forest fire smoke particles. A multiwavelength Raman lidar technique was applied to obtain vertically resolved particle optical properties, and further inversion of those properties with a regularization algorithm allowed for retrieving microphysical information on the studied particles. The results highlight the presence of smoke layers of 1–2 km thickness, located at about 5 km a.s.l. altitude over Granada and Leipzig and around 2.5 km a.s.l. at Warsaw. These layers were intense, as they accounted for more than 30 % of the total AOD (aerosol optical depth) in all cases, and presented optical and microphysical features typical for different aging degrees: color ratio of lidar ratios (LR532 ∕ LR355) around 2, α-related ångström exponents of less than 1, effective radii of 0.3 µm and large values of single scattering albedos (SSA), nearly spectrally independent. The intensive microphysical properties were compared with columnar retrievals form co-located AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) stations. The intensity of the layers was also characterized in terms of particle volume concentration, and then an experimental relationship between this magnitude and the particle extinction coefficient was established. 2024-02-02T10:50:52Z 2024-02-02T10:50:52Z 2017-05-15 journal article Ortiz-Amezcua, P., Guerrero-Rascado, J. L., Granados-Muñoz, M. J., Benavent-Oltra, J. A., Böckmann, C., Samaras, S., Stachlewska, I. S., Janicka, Ł., Baars, H., Bohlmann, S., and Alados-Arboledas, L.: Microphysical characterization of long-range transported biomass burning particles from North America at three EARLINET stations, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 17, 5931–5946, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-5931-2017, 2017. https://hdl.handle.net/10481/88003 10.5194/acp-17-5931-2017 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/654169 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/FP7/262254 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional European Geosciences Union