Satellite remote sensing of nonspherical tropospheric aerosols

Book · Sun Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1995

OSTI ID:220680

Mishchenko, M I ^[1]; Travis, L D; Lacis, A A; Carlson, B E ^[2]

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1. Hughes STX Corp., New York, NY (United States)
2. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, New York, NY (United States). Goddard Inst. for Space Studies

In this paper the authors discuss the possible effect of nonsphericity of solid tropospheric aerosols on the accuracy of aerosol optical thickness retrievals from reflectance measurements over the ocean surface. To model light-scattering properties of nonspherical aerosols, they use a shape mixture of moderately aspherical, randomly oriented polydisperse spheroids. They assume that the size distribution and refractive index of aerosols are known and use the aerosol optical thickness 0.2 to compute the reflectivity for an atmosphere-ocean model similar to that used in the AVHRR aerosol retrieval algorithms. They then use analogous computations for volume-equivalent spherical aerosols with varying optical thickness to invert the simulated nonspherical reflectance. The computations demonstrate that the use of the spherical model to retrieve the optical thickness of actually nonspherical aerosols can result in errors which, depending on the scattering geometry, can well exceed 100%.

• OSTI ID: 220680
• Report Number(s): CONF-9409265--; ISBN 0-8194-1641-X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
AEROSOLS
ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY
CLIMATIC CHANGE
LIGHT SCATTERING
OPACITY
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
REMOTE SENSING
SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION
THEORETICAL DATA
TROPOSPHERE