Retrieval of atmospheric aerosol over mid-latitute grassland with POLDER data Original Research Article

POLDER on ADEOS provided excellent data sets and preliminary results (aerosol index over land) for aerosol remote sensing over land. For further quantitative remote sensing, in present paper, we developed a retrieval scheme of aerosol optical depth over mid-latitude semi-arid grassland of Mongolia/Inner Mongolia region. This scheme is based on a vector radiative transfer model of RT3 of Evans and Stephens (1991) with two modifications. a simplified reflectance model with in the verification in the Inner Mongolia field experiment, a two-parameter modified gamma distribution of aerosol size and a two layer (aerosol- molecular atmosphere) atmospheric model. From above models, polarized radiances are computed for a set of viewing geometry. These polarized radiance are computed for Look Up Table for further retrieval of aerosol optical depth with POLDER data (multiple viewing angles) in which we selected a set of constraints of both surface reflectance and atmospheric aerosols.