- 1Earth and Space Institute, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, USA
- 2Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research (GESTAR II), Baltimore, USA
- 3NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA
- 4Science Systems and Applications, Incorporated, Greenbelt, USA
- 5Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Leiden, Netherlands
- 6NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, USA
- 7Science Applications International Corporation, Reston, USA
- 8NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, USA
Over the past year, the Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP2) multi-angle imaging polarimeter instrument on the NASA Plankton Aerosol Cloud ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission observed the entire Earth every two days. HARP2 measures total and polarized radiances over four spectral channels (440/550/670/870 nm), at up to 90 distinct viewing directions, and over a 114° field-of-view (1550 km cross-track swath). This large volume of daily information requires new approaches to on-orbit operations, data processing, calibration, and science. In this work, we celebrate and recap the first year of HARP2 on PACE – from pre-launch to on-orbit calibration (solar/lunar/vicarious), exciting new and synergistic science products for cloud, aerosol, and ocean properties, and co-located intercomparisons with OCI, SPEXone, and AirHARP2 underflights during the recent NASA PACE-PAX field campaign. We close with a look ahead to HARP2 as a pathfinder for upcoming polarimetry missions.
How to cite: McBride, B., Martins, J. V., Xu, X., Puthukkudy, A., Fernandez-Borda, R., Sienkiewicz, N., Smith, R., Gao, M., van Diedenhoven, B., Stamnes, S., Knobelspiesse, K., Sayer, A., Rajapakshe, C., Franz, B., Patt, F., Arillo, C., Cairns, B., Werdell, J., and Remer, L.: The First Year of the Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP2) on the NASA PACE mission: Performance, Science, and Synergy, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-14437, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-14437, 2025.
