Aerosol optical properties inferred from in-situ and path-averaged measurements

This paper compares in-situ and path-averaged measurements of the electro-optical transmission, with emphasis on aerosol effects. The in-situ sensors consisted of optical particle counters (OPC) and a visibility meter, the path-averaged data was provided by a 7-wavelength transmissometer (MSRT) and a scintillometer (BLS). Data was collected at a test site in Northern Germany. A retrieval algorithm was developed to infer characteristics of the aerosol size distribution (Junge approximation) from the MSRT data. A comparison of the various sensors suggests that the optical particle counters are over-optimistic in their estimate of the transmission.