Retrievals of precipitable water vapor and aerosol optical depth from direct sun measurements with EKO MS711 and MS712 spectroradiometers

Abstract

Abstract. Based on the strict radiative transfer algorithm, a new method is developed to derive the precipitable water vapor (PWV) and aerosol optical depth (AOD) from the ground-based direct sun irradiance measurements. The attenuated direct irradiance from 300 to 1700 nm was measured by a pair of grating spectroradiometers, MS711 and MS712 produced by EKO Instruments, located at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing (39.98∘ N, 116.38∘ E), from June 2020 to March 2021. Compared with regular sun photometers such as CE-318 and POM, EKO instruments can measure a wider range of continuous spectra, but their field of view (FOV) is also relatively large. In the PWV inversion of this work, a strong water vapor absorption band around 1370 nm is introduced to retrieve PWV in a relatively dry atmosphere. The circumsolar radiation (CSR) of the EKO instruments is corrected to reduce the influence of scattering from a relatively larger FOV on the AOD inversion. The PWV and AOD inversion results obtained by MS711 and MS712 are compared with the synchronous data of the CE-318 sun photometer. The two retrieval results are highly consistent. The correlation coefficient, mean bias, and standard deviation of PWVEKO and PWVCIMEL are 0.999, −0.027 cm (−2.42 %), and 0.054 cm (3.93 %), respectively, and the relative deviations of the differences between the two are slightly larger for drier air (PWV < 0.5 cm) and lower solar elevation angle. The correlation coefficients of AODEKO and AODCIMEL at 380, 440, 500, 675, 870, and 1020 nm are greater than 0.99, and the relative deviations vary between −6.59 % and 4.27 %.