Algorithms for Aerosol Retrieval from Heavy Biomass Burning with Mutual Use of Radiance and Polarization Observations By SGLI

This study presents aerosol retrieval from space over extreme biomass burning events. The Japanese mission GCOM-C launched in 2017 loads only SGLI imager. The SGLI contains 19 channels from near-UV to thermal-infrared, including red (0.674 µm) and near-infrared (0.869 µm) polarization channels. This work enhances the advantages of SGLI feature in aerosol remote sensing. It has been shown in the previous work that the near-UV data not only detected absorbing aerosols such as biomass burning aerosols (BBA) or mineral dust (DUST), but is also used to distinguish between BBA and DUST with short wave-IR data. Using a large forest fire in western Canada in 2018 as an example, we show that mutual use of radiance and polarization measurements by SGLI is useful for radiation simulations to characterize heavy biomass burning aerosols.