Remote sensing of large-scale boreal forest fire aerosol in Eastern Asia from ADEOS-2/GLI during spring 2003

Widespread boreal forest fires persisted in Eastern Asia for several months from the beginning of April until September 2003. This resulted in enhanced concentrations of smoke aerosol in a very large region, ranging from the source area of the fires in eastern Siberia to northern and eastern China, Korea, and Japan. The smoke was also detected over large areas of the Pacific Ocean, and was even observed in Alaska. E.g., during mid-May aerosol optical thickness values higher than 4 at mid-visible wavelengths were observed on the ground at Anmyon, Korea, due to transport of forest fire aerosol to this region. Satellite remote sensing provides a very useful tool to observe the temporal evolution and the spatial distribution of the aerosol over large areas. In this work, we employ a newly developed algorithm for the ADEOS-2/GLI sensor, that was launched onboard the ADEOS-2 sensor in December 2002. The algorithm employs two channels in the near-UV to retrieve the aerosol optical thickness and single-scattering albedo of aerosols. Although GLI had only a 7-month lifetime due to the early power failure of the ADEOS-2 satellite in October 2003, it was able to observe the whole period of large-scale forest fire smoke, that heavily impacted Eastern Asia. We also analyze ground based skyradiometer measurements at Sapporo, Japan, which was frequently influenced by forest fire aerosols during spring 2003.