Parallel software for retrieval of aerosol distribution from LIDAR data in the framework of EARLINET-ASOS

Abstract

We present new software for the retrieval of the volume distribution - and thus, other relevant microphysical properties such as the effective radius - of stratospheric and tropospheric aerosols from multiwavelength LIDAR data. We consider the basic equation as a linear ill-posed problem and solve the linear system derived from spline collocation. We consider as well the technical implications of the algorithm implementation. In order to reduce runtime which is incurred by the vast theoretical search space, experiments on the MareNostrum Supercomputer were made to understand the significance of the different search space dimensions on the quality of the solution with the goal of restricting or eliminating entirely certain dimensions of the search space, to massively reduce calculation time for later production runs. Results show that the search space can be reduced according to available computation power to still yield reasonable results. Also, the scalability of the parallel software proved to be good. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.