Aerosols all over the ocean and land

This work focuses on retrieval of continental aerosols using polarized radiance data acquired with POLDER on board the satellite ADEOS-1 from November 1996 to end of June 1997. Our idea comes from the fact that space-based polarized radiance is mainly due to scattering in the atmosphere, because the polarized component of reflected light from the land surface is diffusely reduced by reaching the top of atmosphere. In other words, polarization data observed by satellite involve strong signal on atmospheric particles. It is shown here that POLDER-polarization data are available for aerosol study over land. Our algorithm for aerosol retrieval is based on the light scattering simulations for send-Stokes vector in the Earth atmosphere model. As a result, a global map of aerosol characteristics over the ocean and land is obtained. The derived results are validated with ground based photopolarimetric data.