The Aerosol Characterization from Polarimeter and Lidar (ACEPOL) airborne field campaign

In the fall of 2017, an airborne field campaign was conducted from the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California to advance the remote sensing of aerosols and clouds with Multi-angle Polarimeters (MAP) and Lidars. The Aerosol Characterization from Polarimeter and Lidar (ACEPOL) campaign was jointly sponsored by NASA and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON). Six instruments were deployed on the ER-2 high altitude aircraft. Four were MAPs: the Airborne Hyper Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (AirHARP), the Airborne Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (AirMSPI), the Airborne Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration (SPEX Airborne) and the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP). The remainder were Lidars, including the Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) and the High Spectral Resolution Lidar 2 (HSRL-2). The southern California base of ACEPOL enabled observation of a wide variety of scene types, including urban, desert, forest, coastal ocean and agricultural areas, with clear, cloudy, polluted and pristine atmospheric conditions. Flights were performed in coordination with satellite overpasses and ground based observations, including the Groundbased Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (GroundMSPI), sun photometers, and a surface reflectance spectrometer. ACEPOL is a resource for remote sensing communities as they prepare for the next generation of spaceborne 40 MAP and lidar missions. Data are appropriate for algorithm development and testing, instrument intercomparison, and investigations of active and passive instrument data fusion. They are freely available to the public, at 10.5067/SUBORBITAL/ACEPOL2017/DATA001 (ACEPOL Science Team, 2017). This paper describes ACEPOL for potential data users, and also provides an outline of requirements for future field missions with similar objectives.