Assessing the Aerosol Indirect and Semi-Direct Effect ’ and the work presented in

iAbstract This study aims to identify the challenges associated with assessing the aerosol in-direct and semi-direct effect from space-borne instruments as well as identify some robust aerosol signatures. This study utilizes geographically and temporally co-located data sets of aerosol, cloud, and precipitation properties obtained from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard the Aqua satellite, the Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization instrument aboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations satellite, and the Cloud Profiling Radar aboard the CloudSat satellite. The fo-cus of the study is on a region of the southeastern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Namibia. This region is characterized by a strong and intense seasonal biomass burning cycle. The seasonality of the biomass burning events allows for the analysis of air masses with a large distribution of aerosol concentrations. Statistical analysis included looking at correlations between ten different aerosol metrics as well as cor-relations between these metrics and a variety of cloud macro- and micro-physica