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Published March 1, 2004 | public
Journal Article

Modeling of atmospheric radiative transfer with polarization and its application to the remote sensing of tropospheric ozone

Abstract

Light reflected or transmitted by a planetary atmosphere contains information about particles and molecules in the atmosphere. Therefore, accurate modeling of the radiation field may be used to retrieve information on atmospheric composition. In this paper, a multi-layer model for a vertically inhomogeneous atmosphere is implemented by using the doubling-adding method for a plane-parallel atmosphere. By studying the degree of linear polarization of the transmitted and reflected solar light in the Huggins bands, we find significant differences between tropospheric ozone and stratospheric ozone. The effects of tropospheric ozone change on the linear polarization are 10 times more than that of the same amount of stratospheric ozone change. We also show the aerosol effect on the linear polarization, but this effect is wavelength independent as compared to that caused by the tropospheric ozone change. The results provide a theoretical basis for the retrieval of tropospheric ozone from measurement of linear polarization of the scattered sunlight both from the ground and from a satellite.

Additional Information

© 2003 Elsevier Ltd. Received 21 October 2002, Accepted 11 March 2003, Available online 21 November 2003. We would like to express our appreciation to Mark Allen, Richard Cageao and Andy Ingersoll for their valuable comments, and to Mimi Gerstell for a critical reading of the manuscript. This work was supported in part by NASA grant NAGW 2204 to the California Institute of Technology and was carried out there and at JPL, under contract with NASA.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023