by Athina Argyrouli, Maria Barrera Verdejo, Lev Labzovsky, Ioannis Binietoglou and Robert Banks
On May 13th, the start-up workshop for HygrA-CD campaign has been held in the National Technical University of Athens.The ESR12, Athina Argyrouli, gave an introductory presentation on the objectives of HygrA-CD and the several synergies of remote sensing instruments, in-situ instruments and meteorological models. The ITaRS fellows, Maria Barrera Verdejo, Lev Labzovsky and Ioannis Binietoglou attended the workshop and presented their scientific goals with respect to the campaign. In addition, ESR13 Robert Banks gave a talk about his contribution to HygrA-CD through an e-learning platform which has been offered to be used within ITaRS network by TUDelft. The agenda of this event can be found here.
Athina Argyrouli: I am certainly very happy to host my colleagues in Athens and strengthen links with them scientifically speaking but also at a personal level. During this period of the year, we expect to have development of clouds above the planetary boundary layer over Athens basin. I hope for a rich database at the end of this campaign, useful for the successful development of our projects!
Maria Barrera Verdejo: Together with different sensors in the optical domain, a Microwave Radiometer (MWR) has been set up for the campaign. This instrument is receiving radiation from atmosphere in two bands in the microwave regime (20 and 50 GHz). The MWR, called ACRHAT, is coming directly from Bucharest and placed next to a Raman lidar (RL). It will be specially helpful for my project, whose aim is retrieving the water vapor profiles by merging RL and MWR.
Lev Labzovsky: The main scientific aim of the campaign is strongly related to my PhD project goals. I will be providing the database with the information about water vapor mixing ratio based on the multiwavelength lidar measurements. Microwave radiometer for campaign is provided by the group from Bucharest; hence the second my task is to monitor the operating capability of the radiometer during the campaign.
Ioannis Binietoglou: This measurement campaign is a unique opportunity for studying the structure of aerosol in the PBL. The multiple instruments deployed will helps us explore how we can use different remote sensing instruments to fully characterize atmospheric aerosols. My goal during the campaign is to test current capabilities of automatic lidar processing, an important step towards aerosol model evaluation and data assimilation.
Robert Banks: During the campaign numerical simulations of atmospheric variables including planetary boundary layer (PBL) height, 2-m air temperature, and wind speed and direction from the Weather Research and Forecasting – Advanced Research WRF mesoscale meteorological model will be evaluated. The main objective of this work is to assess the sensitivity of atmospheric variables in the PBL to different PBL parameterization schemes.