Climatic Influences on the Spatial and Temporal Variability of Aerosols over North America

气溶胶通过散射和吸收太阳辐射，并通过影响云的物理性质，在气候系统中发挥重要作用。尽管气溶胶很重要，但确定其空间和时间变异性的过程还没有被很好地理解。此外，所有量化浑浊度的方法，也就是大气中气溶胶的总量，都受到重大限制，因为它们需要晴朗的天空条件。这一限制在浊度记录和采样偏差中产生了缺口，这导致了关于气溶胶可变性的可疑推论。这项研究将利用气象和气候学分析以及来自40个观测站的气溶胶数据来解释北美大陆上空气溶胶特性的时间和空间变异性。然后，这些分析将被用来提供比目前可获得的更具代表性的气溶胶气候(气溶胶属性的统计摘要)。这项研究将改进区域和全球气候模式中的气溶胶参数，这将有助于阐明气溶胶和温室气体在气候系统中的相对作用。因此，这项研究将进一步加深我们对影响气候和气候变化的因素的了解，这将有助于政策制定者制定知情的气候变化政策。

Aerosols play an important role in the climate system by scattering and absorbing solar radiation and by affecting the physical properties of clouds. Despite the importance of aerosols, the processes that determine their spatial and temporal variability are not well understood. Furthermore, all methods for quantifying turbidity, which is the total amount of aerosol in the atmosphere, suffer from a major constraint in that they require cloudless sky conditions. This restriction produces gaps in the turbidity record and a sampling bias, which has led to questionable inferences about the variability of aerosols. This research will use meteorological and climatological analyses, together with aerosol data from 40 stations, to explain temporal and spatial variability in aerosol properties over continental North America. These analyses will then be used to provide aerosol climatologies (statistical summaries of aerosol properties) that will be more representative than those presently available. This research will permit improved aerosol parameterizations in regional and global climate models, which will help elucidate the relative roles of aerosols and greenhouse gases in the climate system. The research will therefore further our knowledge of the factors that influence climate and climate change and this will help policy makers prepare informed climate change policies.