Evaluation of PARASOL aerosol retrieval over North East Asia

The third POLDER. (POLarization and Directionality of the Earth Reflectance) instrument, PARASOL (Polarization & Anisotropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Sciences coupled with Observations from a Lidar) was launched in December 2004 and started its operational life at the early beginning of March 2005. This study is devoted to the regional validation of PARASOL aerosol retrieval scheme over land surfaces against independent automatic sun-photometers located in the northeast part of China at the Beijing and Xianghe sites both included in AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network). PARASOL Level 2 Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) is shown, thanks to the high quality sun-photometer dataset, to be quite consistent with the AERONET AOT of the fine fractional part of the size distribution (radius <= 0.3 mu m). In other words, PARASOL retrieval over land is mainly sensitive to the anthropogenic aerosols which are known for influencing the climate, environment as well as human health. Moreover, analysis of polarization in the 490 ran band (Level I data) shows the possibility of dust type aerosol identification thus yielding to a potential algorithm improvement in the future. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All fights reserved.