Abstract
Abstract. This paper evaluates the information content for the retrieval of key aerosol microphysical and surface properties for multispectral single-viewing satellite polarimetric measurements cantered at 410, 443, 555, 670, 865, 1610 and 2250 nm over bright land. To conduct the information content analysis, the synthetic data are simulated by the Unified Linearized Vector Radiative Transfer Model (UNLVTM) with the intensity and polarization together over bare soil surface for various scenarios. Following the optimal estimation theory, a principal component analysis method is employed to reconstruct the multispectral surface reflectance from 410 nm to 2250 nm, and then integrated with a linear one-parametric BPDF model to represent the contribution of polarized surface reflectance, thus further to decouple the surface-atmosphere contribution from the TOA measurements. Focusing on two different aerosol models with the aerosol optical depth equal to 0.8 at 550 nm, the total DFS and DFS component of each retrieval aerosol and surface parameter are analysed. The DFS results show that the key aerosol microphysical properties, such as the fine- and coarse-mode columnar volume concentration, the effective radius and the real part of complex refractive index at 550 nm, could be well retrieved with the surface parameters simultaneously over bare soil surface type. The findings of this study can provide the guidance to the inversion algorithm development over bright surface land by taking full use of the single-viewing satellite polarimetric measurements.
Highlights
Retrieval of aerosol properties from the air-borne and spaceborne polarimetric measurements have received rapidly increased attention in recent years
Other new developed instruments include the research about airborne Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP) and Airborne Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (AirMSPI) (Waquet et al, 2009; Xu et al, 2017), as well as the space borne Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS) (Wu et al, 2015)
Following the synthetic data simulated by UNL-VTM from the multispectral single-viewing measurements of the intensity and polarization together over bright bare soil surface for various scenarios, we conduct the information content analysis for aerosol microphysical and surface properties
Summary
Retrieval of aerosol properties from the air-borne and spaceborne polarimetric measurements have received rapidly increased attention in recent years. The averaging kernel matrix is introduced to characterize the changes in the retrieved stated vector to changes in the true state vector, and the trace of this matrix is equivalent to the number of independent pieces of information from the topof-atmosphere (TOA) measurements, called the degree of freedom for signal (DFS) (Frankenberg et al, 2012; Xu & Wang, 2015; Chen et al, 2017) In this way, DFS is used to quantitatively represent the number of aerosol and surface parameters that can be retrieved independently from TOA radiance and polarization measurements, provided that the prior errors of retrieval parameters are characterized. As long as the DFS result A:,: > 0.5 , we assume that the retrieval of parameter x: could be carried out (Hou et al, 2018)
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