GACP Projects
Abstract: Thome
Kurtis J. Thome
Abstract: The work proposed in this letter proposal builds on the inflight, vicarious calibration of the solar-reflective bands of numerous ESE sensors by the Remote Sensing Group (RSG) at the University of Arizona. These vicarious calibration campaigns rely to a great part on the ground-based retrievals of aerosol parameters using directly-transmitted solar energy and downwelling skylight. The RSG has a history of developing instrumentation as well as the processing software to determine aerosol size distribution, scattering phase function, and columnar amounts of ozone and water vapor. This includes development of a three-band system for columnar water vapor retrieval, a hyperspectral system for the SWIR spectral range, a solar-aureole camera based on a 2-D CCD, an autotracking solar radiometer with the capacity to measure polarized skylight, and a diffuse and global irradiance sensor using an integrating sphere, and a LiCor, LI1800 spectrometer. This ground-based work has led to techniques to atmospherically correct ASTER and ETM+ data and the validation methods for proposed atmospheric correction work. The work proposed here will use future field campaigns that are already planned in conjunction with vicarious calibration and atmospheric correction studies for ASTER, ETM+, MODIS, and SeaWiFS, and joint EOS campaigns to capitalize on already funded and organized field collections to further develop a set of uncertainties in the satellite retrieval of aerosol properties and an opportunity for using multiple, independent methods for retrievals of aerosol properties and testing planned approaches for validation of the methods developed by the Aerosol Science Team.
