Aerosol remote sensing from POLDER measurements

POLDER-1 flew from November 1996 to June 1997 onboard ADEOS-1 (Advanced Earth Observing Satellite) before the platform failure due to a solar panel. The data obtained during these eight months were used to characterize tropospheric aerosol over oceanic and land surfaces. Over the oceans, a good agreement was found between the optical thickness derived both from POLDER and ground based photometers but the satellite Angstrom exponent was often underestimated. Over land, the results showed the sensor capability to detect the small spherical aerosols, mainly anthropogenic ones, from polarized measurements. The measurement quality and the data analysis allow improving the aerosol characterization with more elaborated algorithms tested on POLDER-1 data. These algorithms are presented in this paper with some illustrations over oceanic and continental surfaces.