Inversion of multi-angular polarimetric measurements from the ACEPOL campaign: an application of improving aerosol property and hyperspectral ocean color retrievals.

NASA's Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, scheduled for launch in the timeframe of late 2022 to early 2023, will carry the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), a hyperspectral scanning radiometer, and two multi-angle polarimeters (MAP), the UMBC Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP2) and the SRON Spectro-Polarimeter for Planetary EXploration one (SPEXone). One purpose of the PACE MAPs is to better characterize aerosols properties, which can then be used to improve atmospheric correction for the retrieval of ocean color in coastal waters. Though this is theoretically promising, the use of MAP data in the atmospheric correction of collocated hyperspectral ocean color measurements has not yet been well demonstrated. In this work, we performed aerosol retrievals using the MAP measurements from the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP), and demonstrate its application to the atmospheric correction of hyperspectral radiometric measurements from SPEX Airborne. Both measurements were collected on the same aircraft from the Aerosol Characterization from Polarimeter and Lidar (ACEPOL) field campaign in 2017. Two cases over ocean with small aerosol loading (aerosol optical depth ~0.04) are identified including collocated RSP and SPEX Airborne measurements and Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) in-situ observations. The aerosol retrievals are performed and compared with two options: one uses reflectance only and the other use both reflectance and polarization. It is demonstrated that polarization information helps reduce the uncertainties of aerosol microphysical and optical properties. The retrieved aerosol properties are then used to compute the contribution of atmosphere and ocean surface for atmospheric correction over the discrete bands from RSP measurements and the hyperspectral SPEX Airborne measurements. The water leaving signals determined this way are compared with both AERONET and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Ocean Color products with good agreement. The results and lessons-learned from this work will provide a basis to fully exploit the information from the unique combination of sensors on PACE for aerosol characterization and ocean ecosystem research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]