Microphysical Properties of Aerosols Encountered During the 2012 TCAP Campaign Using the Research Scanning Polarimeter

The Two-Column Aerosol Project (TCAP) campaign was conducted during the summer of 2012, off the East coast of the United States by Cape Cod. The NASA GISS Research Scanning Polarimeter, a multi-angle, multi-spectral polarimeter measured the upwelling polarized radiances from a B200 aircraft over a period of several weeks and over a distance of several hundred kilometers. A new algorithm based on optimal estimation that can retrieve aerosol microphysical properties using highly accurate radiative transfer and Mie calculations is presented. First, results for synthetic simulated data are discussed. The algorithm is then applied to real data collected during TCAP to retrieve the aerosol microphysical state vector and corresponding uncertainty for the aerosols that were encountered. Simultaneous measurements were also made by the NASA Langley airborne High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL2), which provided extinction and backscatter profiles. The RSP-retrieved microphysical properties are compared to the extinction and backscatter products, and to the HSRL2-retrieved microphysical products.