A Sensitivity Study of Atmospheric Reflectance to Aerosol Layer Height based on Multi-angular Polarimetric measurements

The reflected Solar radiance at top of atmosphere (TOA) are, to some degree, sensitive to the vertical distribution of absorbing aerosols, especially at short wavelengths (i.e. blue and UV bands). If properly exploited, it may enable the extraction of basic information on aerosol vertical distribution. In recent years, rapid development of the advanced spectral multi-angle polarimetric satellite observation technology and aerosol inversion algorithm makes the extraction of more aerosol information possible. In this study, we perform a sensitivity analysis of the reflection function at TOA to the aerosol layer height, to explore the potential for aerosol height retrievals by using multi-angle total and polarized reflectance passive observations at short wavelength. Employing a vector doubling-adding method radiative transfer code RT3, a series of numerical experiments were conducted considering different aerosol model, optical depth (AOD), single-scattering albedo (SSA), and scale height (H), also the wavelength, solar-viewing geometry, etc. The sensitivity of both intensity and polarization signals to the aerosol layer height as well as the interacted impactions with SSA and AOD are analyzed. It's found that the sensitivity of the atmospheric reflection function to aerosol scale height increase with aerosol loading (i.e. AOD) and aerosol absorption (i.e. SSA), and decrease with wavelength. The scalar reflectance is sensitive to aerosol absorption while the polarized reflectance is more influenced by the altitude. Then the aerosol H and SSA may be derived simultaneously assuming that the total and polarized radiances in UV bands deconvolve the relative influences of height and absorption.