Model selection in atmospheric remote sensing with application to aerosol retrieval from DSCOVR/EPIC. Part 2: Numerical analysis

An algorithm for retrieving aerosol parameters by taking into account the uncertainty in 1 aerosol model selection is applied to the retrieval of aerosol optical thickness and aerosol layer height 2 from synthetic measurements from the EPIC sensor onboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory. The 3 synthetic measurements are generated using aerosol models derived from AERONET measurements 4 at different sites, while other commonly used aerosol models, such as OPAC, GOCART, OMI, and 5 MODIS databases are used in the retrieval. The numerical analysis is focused on the estimation of 6 retrieval errors when the true aerosol model is unknown. We found that the best aerosol model is the 7 one with a value of the asymmetry parameter and an angular variation of the phase function around 8 the viewing direction that are close to the values corresponding to the reference aerosol model.