The Tibetan Plateau Space-based Tropospheric Aerosol Climatology: 2007–2020

Abstract. A comprehensive and robust dataset of tropospheric aerosol properties is important for understanding the effects of aerosol-radiation feedback on the climate system and reducing the uncertainties of climate models. The third pole of Earth (Tibetan Plateau, TP) is highly challenging to obtain long-term in situ aerosol data due to its harsh environmental conditions. Here, we provide more reliable the new vertical aerosol index (AI) parameter from the spaceborne-based Lidar (CALIOP) of CALIPSO over TP during 2007–2020 between daytime and nighttime to investigate the aerosol’s climatology. The calculated vertical AI was derived from the aerosol extinction coefficient (EC), which was rigorously quality-checked and validation, strictly quality checked, and validated for passive satellite sensors (MODIS) and ground-based LIDAR measurements. Generally, all those facts demonstrate the agreement of the AI dataset with the CALIOP and ground-based LIDAR. Besides, all the evidence shows that after removing the low-reliability aerosol target signal, the optimized data can obtain the aerosol characteristics with higher reliability. Our data set also reveals the patterns and numbers of high-altitude vertical structure characteristics of the aerosol troposphere over the TP. Our dataset will help to update and makeup the observational aerosol data in the TP. We encourage climate modeling groups to consider new analyses of the AI vertical patterns, comparing the recovered datasets, with the potential to increase our understanding of the aerosol-cloud-radiation-precipitation interaction and its climate effects. Data described in this work are available at https://data.tpdc.ac.cn/en/disallow/03fa38bc-25bd-46c5-b8ce-11b457f7d7fd DOI:10.11888/Atmos.tpdc.300614 (Honglin Pan et al., 2023).