Recovered measurements of the 1960s stratospheric aerosol layer and
UM-UKCA model experiments to assess the Mar 1963 Agung, Sep 1965 Taal
and Aug 1966 Awu volcanic aerosol clouds
Abstract
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).