Synergetic aerosol retrieval from SCIAMACHY and AATSR onboard ENVISAT

T. Holzer-Popp (1) , M. Schroedter-Homscheidt (1) , H. Breitkreuz (2) , D. Martynenko (1) , L. Klüser (1, 3)

1 DLR - German Aerospace Center
2 JMU - Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
3 UNIA - University of Augsburg

The synergetic aerosol retrieval method SYNAER (Holzer-Popp et al., 2002a) has been extended to the use of ENVISAT measurements. It exploits the complementary information of a radiometer and a spectrometer onboard one satellite platform to extract aerosol optical depth (AOD) and speciation (as choice from a representative set of pre-defined mixtures of water-soluble, soot, mineral dust, and sea salt components). SYNAER consists of two retrieval steps. In the first step the radiometer is used to do accurate cloud screening, and subsequently to quantify the aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 550 nm and spectral surface brightness through a dark field technique. In the second step the spectrometer is applied to choose the most plausible aerosol type through a least square fit of the measured spectrum with simulated spectra using the AOD and surface brightness retrieved in the first step. This method was developed and a first case study evaluation against few (15) multi-spectral ground-based AERONET sun photometer observations was conducted with a sensor pair (ATSR-2 and GOME) onboard ERS-2. However, due to instrumental limitations the coverage of SYNAER/ERS-2 and the AERONET network in 1997/98 is very sparse and thus only few coincidences with AERONET were found. Therefore, SYNAER was transferred to similar sensors AATSR and SCIAMACHY onboard ENVISAT. While transferring to the new sensor pair a thorough evaluation of the synergetic methodology and its information content has been conducted, which led to significant improvements in the methodology: an update of the aerosol model, an improved cloud detection, and an enhanced dark field albedo characterization. This paper describes the information content analysis and these improvements in detail and presents first results of applying the SYNAER methodology to AATSR and SCIAMACHY.

Domaines: Océan, Atmosphère

T. Holzer-Popp, M. Schroedter-Homscheidt, H. Breitkreuz, D. Martynenko, L. Klüser. Synergetic aerosol retrieval from SCIAMACHY and AATSR onboard ENVISAT. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, 2008, 8 (1), pp.2903-2951. ⟨hal-00303971⟩