Modeling of Atmospheric Radiative Transfer with Polarization and Its Application to the Remote Sensing of Tropospheric Ozone

Light reflected or transmitted by a planetary atmosphere contains information about particles and molecules in the atmosphere. Therefore, accurate modeling of the radiation field may be used to retrieve information on atmospheric composition. In this paper, a multi-layer model for a vertically inhomogeneous atmosphere is implemented by using the doubling-adding method for a plane-parallel atmopshere. By studying the degree of polarization of the transmitted and reflected solar light in the Huggins bands, we show that the behavior of tropospheric ozone and stratospheric ozone, and the lower tropospheric and upper tropopsheric ozone are significantly different. This result provides the theoretical basis for the retrieval of tropospheric ozone from the measurement of the degree of polarization of the scattered sunlight both from the ground and from the space.