Polarimetric Validation of the PACE Observatory

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and the City College of New York (CCNY) operate a comprehensive suite of instrumentation to measure and characterize the uncertainty of polarized radiation, as well as particle size distributions (PSDs), particle shape characterization and imaging, advanced chlorophyll fluorescence analysis, and seawater inherent optical properties (IOPs) and constituents. Measured attenuation (c) and absorption (a) coefficients of water and the degree of linear polarization (DoLP) above the surface derived from measurements of polarized radiances at Hyper-Angular Research Polarimeter 2 (HARP2) wavelengths will be used for the validation of a newly developed neural network algorithm for the retrieval of the c/a ratio from combined Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) and HARP-2 measurements (Agagliate et al., Frontiers in Remote Sensing, 2023).