The Aerosol Characterization from Polarimeter and Lidar (ACEPOL) airborne field campaign

Abstract

In the fall of 2017, an airborne field campaign was conducted from the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, to advance the remote sensing of aerosols and clouds with multi-angle polarimeters (MAP) and lidars. The Aerosol Characterization from Polarimeter and Lidar (ACEPOL) campaign was jointly sponsored by NASA and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON). Six instruments were deployed on the ER-2 high-altitude aircraft. Four were MAPs: the Airborne Hyper Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (AirHARP), the Airborne Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (AirMSPI), the Airborne Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration (SPEX airborne), and the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP). The remainder were lidars, including the Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) and the High Spectral Resolution Lidar 2 (HSRL-2). The southern California base of ACEPOL enabled observation of a wide variety of scene types, including urban, desert, forest, coastal ocean, and agricultural areas, with clear, cloudy, polluted, and pristine atmospheric conditions. Flights were performed in coordination with satellite overpasses and ground-based observations, including the Ground-based Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (GroundMSPI), sun photometers, and a surface reflectance spectrometer. ACEPOL is a resource for remote sensing communities as they prepare for the next generation of spaceborne MAP and lidar missions. Data are appropriate for algorithm development and testing, instrument intercomparison, and investigations of active and passive instrument data fusion. They are freely available to the public. The DOI for the primary database is https://doi.org/10.5067/SUBORBITAL/ACEPOL2017/DATA001 (ACEPOL Science Team, 2017), while for AirMSPI it is https://doi.org/10.5067/AIRCRAFT/AIRMSPI/ACEPOL/RADIANCE/ELLIPSOID_V006 and https://doi.org/10.5067/AIRCRAFT/AIRMSPI/ACEPOL/RADIANCE/TERRAIN_V006 (ACEPOL AirMSPI 75 Science Team, 2017a, b). GroundMSPI data are at https://doi.org/10.5067/GROUND/GROUNDMSPI/ACEPOL/RADIANCE_v009 (GroundMSPI Science Team, 2017). Table 3 lists further details of these archives. This paper describes ACEPOL for potential data users and also provides an outline of requirements for future field missions with similar objectives.