Aerosol columnar properties retrieved from CIMEL radiometers during VELETA 2002

During the 2002 summer, the VELETA 2002 field campaign has been carried out at the Sierra Nevada Massif, close to Granada in South-Eastern Spain. During the campaign, CIMEL CE-318 robotic radiometer has been one of the key instruments in the characterization of the atmospheric aerosol columnar properties. This kind of radiometers have been operated at Motril, a coastal location at sea level, Pitres (1200 m a.s.l.), located in the South slope of Sierra Nevada Massif, Las Sabinas (2200m a.s.l.), located on the north slope of the mountain range, and Armilla (680m a.s.l.), located in the valley. The principal feature of the locations is that they provide a strong altitudinal gradient. This work presents the evolution of changes followed by the atmospheric aerosol in the vertical column. Columnar aerosol properties have been derived from the CIMEL CE-318 measurements obtained at the four stations. In this sense, the combination of solar direct measurements and sky radiances were used to retrieve the aerosol columnar size distributions by means of Nakajima's code. Marked changes in the atmospheric aerosol along the campaign have been explained in terms of the synoptic conditions. A detailed study of the columnar properties at the different places has been done. Changes in the spectral dependence of the single scattering albedo under the influence of different air masses have been discussed. The size distributions have been fitted to a bimodal lognormal distribution function model, and the associated parameters have been correlated with aerosol optical depth or Angstrom exponent. In some cases, it has been necessary to develop different correlations for cases affected or non-affected by the arrival of Saharan dust. In the case of Armilla (680 m a.s.l.) and Las Sabinas (2200 m a.s.l.), the small horizontal distance allow us to consider that both stations are representative of the same atmospheric column, a fact that has been used to analyse the daily evolution of the mixing layer in the north slope. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.