The impact of aerosols on polarized sky radiance: model development, validation, and applications
By Claudia Emde, R. Buras, Bernhard Mayer, M. Blumthaler. 2009
149 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. Although solar radiation initially is unpolarized when entering the Earth's atmosphere, it is polarized by scattering processes with molecules, water droplets, ice crystals, and aerosols. Hence, measurements of the polarization state of radiation can be used to improve remote sensing of aerosols and clouds. The analysis of polarized radiance measurements requires an accurate radiative transfer model. To this end, a new efficient and flexible three-dimensional Monte Carlo code to compute polarized radiances has been developed and implemented into MYSTIC (Monte Carlo code for the phYSically correct Tracing of photons In Cloudy atmospheres). The code has been extensively validated against published benchmark results. The polarized downwelling radiation field is calculated for various aerosol types showing the high sensitivity of polarized ultraviolet radiances to the particle microphysics. Model simulations are compared to ground based measurements and found to be qualitatively in good agreement. Quantitative differences can be attributed to the assumed aerosol models based on the OPAC aerosol database, which does not include exactly the types of aerosols that have been observed. This comparison to the measurements shows that there is a high potential to retrieve information about the aerosol type from polarized radiance measurements.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f67c51f887f189ac6e3574daed7d52440e3c8978
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atmospheric Science
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- The Monte Carlo atmospheric radiative transfer model McArtim: Introduction and validation of Jacobians and 3D features (2011, background): “Another promising extension in the remote sensing of aerosols in combination with RTM is to detect the degree of polarization of the scattered light (see [34–36]).”
- The libRadtran software package for radiative transfer calculations (version 2.0.1) (2015, methodology): “One of the major extensions is the implementation of polarization in the radiative transfer solver MYSTIC (Monte Carlo code for the phYSically correct Tracing of photons In Cloudy atmospheres) (Emde et al., 2010), which is important because an increasing number of polarimetric observations have been”
- Benchmark results in vector atmospheric radiative transfer (2010, methodology): “The radiative transfer model MYSTIC (Monte-Carlo code for the phYSically correct Tracing of photons In Cloudy atmospheres) [25–27] is one of the most versatile Monte-Carlo codes for atmospheric radiative transfer.”