Aerosol retrieval from airborne Polder data by multiple scattering model

The POLDER (POLarization and Directionality of Earth Reflectances) sensor, now under developement at CNES, France, has been selected to be flown on board a Japanese satellite ADEOS scheduled for launch in 1996. Several airborne POLDER campaigns have been conducted by CNES and Laboratoire d´Optique Atmospherique (LOA), University of Science and Technology of Lille (USTL) since 1990. In this paper the authors analyzed the subset of the Medimar campaign data sets by using multiple scattering models. Assuming an atmosphere-ocean system with a rough ocean surface of Cox-Munk type reflection model the theoretical reflectance and linear polarization are computed by the doubling and adding method for several atmospheric models. For the first time, the simulated reflectance and polarization images based in the multiple scattering computations are presented. By comparing the theoretical results with observational data the authors find that many conspicuous features in the observed reflectance image as well as the polarization image can be explained by sea surface reflection together with the coupled interaction between the atmosphere and the sea surface