Improvement of broadband radiance to flux conversion by using the synergy between active and passive remote sensing instruments

Carlos Domenech; David P. Donovan; Howard W. Barker; Marc Bouvet; Ernesto Lopez-Baeza

doi:10.1117/12.738156

25 October 2007 Improvement of broadband radiance to flux conversion by using the synergy between active and passive remote sensing instruments

Carlos Domenech, David P. Donovan, Howard W. Barker, Marc Bouvet, Ernesto Lopez-Baeza

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6745, Remote Sensing of Clouds and the Atmosphere XII; 67450Z (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.738156
Event: SPIE Remote Sensing, 2007, Florence, Italy

Abstract

The ESA EarthCARE (Earth Clouds Aerosols and Radiation Explorer) mission includes the BBR (Broad-Band Radiometer), the instrument responsible to provide measurements of broadband radiances over the along-track satellite path. The BBR footprint will be geolocated in space and time with the passive sensor, MSI (Multi-Spectral Imager), and the active sensors, ATLID (ATmospheric LIDar) and CPR (Cloud Profiler Radar) onboard the same platform. The role of the BBR was defined to provide the boundary condition for top of atmosphere flux densities. Thus, the radiance to flux conversion is the main objective for the BBR retrieval algorithms. This conversion has been so far carried out by using specific angular distribution models (ADMs). In this process, every radiance is classified in a unique scene bin of observations characterized by a similar anisotropic behaviour. Each of these scene bins is defined by a range of values distinguishable by the MSI. But the MSI can only extract vertically integrated retrievals. Therefore, in multi-layer cloud configurations, scene identification (ID) by means of the MSI retrievals will not distinguish the 3-D structure of the real scenes. Thus, these scenes will most probably be wrongly identified. But, since active sensors are present on the same satellite platform, it would be possible to use their observations to contribute to the BBR scene ID. This work shows a preliminary simulation approach to demonstrate the advantages of this methodology by applying it to multi-layer clouds. The clouds have been built with a stochastic cloud generator model, and the radiative transfer simulations have been carried out with the EarthCARE Simulator, a Monte-Carlo code capable to reproduce the observations of the different mission instruments taking into account the specific characteristics of each sensor.

Citation Download Citation

Carlos Domenech, David P. Donovan, Howard W. Barker, Marc Bouvet, and Ernesto Lopez-Baeza "Improvement of broadband radiance to flux conversion by using the synergy between active and passive remote sensing instruments", Proc. SPIE 6745, Remote Sensing of Clouds and the Atmosphere XII, 67450Z (25 October 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.738156

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