I think probably because it provides the data aerosol absorption—an aerosol property driving the influence of atmospheric aerosol on climate, but which is very difficult to measure. Also, because the paper summarizes the effort of the whole AERONET (AErosol RObotic NETwork), which is a project with high visibility for a rather broad scientific community.

The paper gives a comprehensive climatology on aerosol absorption—data highly demanded for reducing uncertainty in estimates of global climate change.

The paper uses eight years of worldwide data from the AERONET ground-based radiometers to characterize the aerosol absorption in several key locations with differing aerosol types. The results indicate significant variability of the aerosol absorption due mainly to different meteorological characteristics and also due to differing meteorological conditions. The results reveal several important differences with previous knowledge and clarify features inherent for absorption of each type of aerosol. For example, it was found that biomass burning smoke can be both strongly absorbing and almost non-absorbing depending on the vegetation type burned and whether the combustion is from flaming or smoldering; urban aerosol absorption is much stronger in places where fuels produce much of the air pollution such as more black carbon (i.e. diesel fuel) or where pollution filtering technology is not widely applied; desert dust absorbs much less solar radiation than known aerosol models predict (this finding is in agreement with satellite analysis).

First, I had joined the AERONET project with the task of improving aerosol retrievals via the inversion of measured atmospheric radiation. Second, many aerosol scientists (especially the co-authors of this paper) encouraged me to look at the retrieval of aerosol absorption which is of high scientific importance and can be obtained from AERONET measurements only by using inversion techniques.

Oleg Dubovik, Ph.D.
Associate Research Scientist, GEST Center/UMBC
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD, USA