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Ganguly, D, Paul Ginoux, and V Ramaswamy, et al., 2009: Retrieving the composition and concentration of aerosols over the Indo-Gangetic basin using CALIOP and AERONET data. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L13806, doi:10.1029/2009GL038315.

We have developed at GFDL, a method to retrieve the concentration of major aerosol types using Lidar and Sun-photometer data. The retrieved concentration of aerosol types are then used to evaluate each component in the GFDL climate model. The Figure below shows the application of our method over Kanpur (India) which is poorly characterized in terms of aerosol concentration, although they are known to reduce drastically the visibility over this region and have been shown to influence the Indian monsoon. For detailed description of our method and its evaluation, please see Ganguly, Ginoux, and Ramaswamy (JGR, 2009), and for its application over the Indo-Gangetic basin see Ganguly, Ginoux, and Ramaswamy (GRL) 2009.

Figure caption: Comparison of Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), single scattering albedo, and size distribution of aerosols from the AERONET site at Kanpur and the extinction profile from CALIOP with their estimated values based on our retrieval for December 2007. Panel b and c also show the contribution of individual aerosol components to the total size distribution and extinction profile respectively based on our results. Maroon line in panel c represents the relative humidity profile from NCEP reanalysis.