Simultaneous aerosol and ocean retrievals from PACE multi-angle polarimeters: data products and validation

The NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, successfully launched on February 8, 2024, with aims to advance our understanding of global ocean ecology, biogeochemistry, atmospheric aerosols, and clouds. PACE features cutting-edge instruments, including the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), a hyperspectral scanning radiometer, and two Multi-Angle Polarimeters (MAPs): the UMBC Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP2) and the SRON Spectro-Polarimeter for Planetary EXploration one (SPEXone). These instruments offer valuable data for simultaneous retrievals of aerosol, cloud, and surface properties.

This talk will focus on simultaneous aerosol and ocean retrievals derived from PACE MAP measurements, emphasizing data products, uncertainties, and validation. The retrieved products encompass aerosol properties such as complex refractive index, effective radius and variance, layer height, optical depth, and single-scattering albedo, as well as oceanic and surface properties. To streamline operational processing, we have incorporated deep neural network-based radiative transfer models into the PACE polarimetric retrieval algorithms via the FastMAPOL framework. Preliminary validation against in-situ measurements will be presented, along with potential applications of MAP data, including the study of ocean color bidirectional reflectance signals and multi-angle cloud masking.