Information On Tropospheric Ozone From Space Borne Polarization Measurements

Tropospheric ozone retrieval from reflectance spectra is an important issue for many current and future satellite instruments.However, it is difficult to distinguish between stratospheric and tropospheric ozone on the basis of reflectance spectra only, because the reflectance is a quantity that is more sensitive to stratospheric ozone than to tro- pospheric ozone. In this paper we show that satellite measurements of the state of polarization of backscattered light contain valuable additional information on tropo- spheric ozone. The reason for this is the high sensitivity of the state of polarization to tropospheric ozone. This is because the state of polarization is most sensitive to ozone at that altitude where most scattering takes place, which is in the troposphere for wavelengths >300 nm. Retrievals performed on synthetic GOME-2 data show that the vertical resolution of the tropospheric ozone profile is significantly improved if a polarization measurement is used in addition to the reflectance spectrum. Prob- lems that are currently encountered in tropospheric ozone retrieval from reflectance spectra may be solved by using additional polarization measurements.