Graham Mann

and 9 more

In this presentation I will explain an analysis of three different recovered remote-sensing measurements of the 1960s Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude stratospheric aerosol layer. Two of the datasets were recovered within student projects on the Leeds MRes in Climate and Atmospheric Science, the 3rd following a collaboration with Dr. Juan-Carlos Antuna Marrero (Univ. Valladolid, Spain) as part of a “data rescue activity” within the World Climate Research Program activity on stratospheric sulphur, SSiRC: http://www.sparc-ssirc.org/data/datarescueactivity.html Two of the datasets are for the 1963-1965 period when the tropical stratospheric reservoir was highly elevated following the two March 1963 Agung major eruptions (e.g. Niemeier et al., 2019): a series of searchlight measurements from White Sands, New Mexico during 1963 and 1964 (Elterman and Campbell, 1964; Elterman, 1966; Elterman et al., 1973), and the first ever multi-annual stratospheric aerosol dataset from the MIT lidar at Lexington, Massachussetts (Grams, 1966; Grams & Fiocco, 1967; Antuna Marrero et al., 2020). The 3rd dataset, from the 1966-67 period (after the Agung aerosol cloud had fully dispersed) is from two types of balloon measurements: a dust-sonde OPC (Rosen, 1964; Rosen, 1968) and solar-extinction-sounder (Rosen, 1969; Pepin, 1970) both balloon instruments measuring during a Sep 1966 field campaign in the tropics (Panama City, Panama) and a sustained set of NH mid-latitude measurements from Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1963-1967. The observations will be compared to interactive stratospheric aerosol model simulations in GA4 UM-UKCA of the Agung aerosol cloud (Dhomse et al., 2020) and new model experiments seeking to constrain the aerosol clouds from two VEI4 eruptions in Sep 1965 (Taal, Phillipines) and Aug 1966 (Awu, Indonesia).