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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Nov 16.
Published in final edited form as: Bull Am Meteorol Soc. 2019 Aug 28;100(8):1511–1528. doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0100.1

Fig. 7.

Fig. 7.

MERRA-2 (2003–17; Randles et al. 2017) climatology of AOD over the western North Atlantic Ocean for the two 2-month periods that ACTIVATE will target: (a) Feb–Mar and (b) May–Jun. Mean annual time series (2003–17) are shown for Aqua MODIS-derived parameters including (c) CTH, (d) cloud LWP, (e) Nd, and (f) AOD. CERES Edition 4 was used for cloud retrievals (Minnis et al. 2011) and Collection 6 was used for AOD (Levy et al. 2013). In addition, the AOD time series only includes data with cloud fraction less than 0.5 (50%), whereas the cloud property time series are for overcast pixels. Gray areas correspond to the monthly standard deviation. The ACTIVATE periods are denoted by black markers, which capture the wide range in AOD, Nd, and cloud properties desired for building robust model parameterizations.