On behalf of the NASA ACE Mission, our goal is to assist the calibration, algorithm development and data intercomparison/validation for existing airborne prototype polarimeters.
The Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) mission was recommended by the National Research Council in their 2007 Earth Science Decadal Survey. One of the proposed ACE instrument payloads is a passive polarimeter intended for the measurement of aerosol and cloud optical properties. As part of the ACE mission's pre-formulation studies, aircraft polarimeter prototypes have been developed and deployed in several field campaigns. The intent of these efforts is to help determine the optimal ACE mission objectives and instrument characteristics, so the purpose of the ACE Polarimeter Working Group (ACEPWG) is to help organize this endeavor. The ACEPWG is a forum for the sharing of calibration techniques, geophysical parameter retrieval algorithm methods and intercomparisons of both Level 1 (calibrated radiometric and polarimetric observations) and Level 2 (retrieved geophysical parameter) products. More information:
- ACE mission homepage
- ACE (draft) white paper, 2010
- ACE polarimeter requirements table (simplified by K. Knobelspiesse from white paper)
ACEPOL field campaign October/November, 2017
Airborne Polarimeters
- Airborne Multi-angle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (AirMSPI), Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP) / Passive Aerosol and Cloud Suite (PACS), University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP), NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
- Spectropolarimeter for Planetary Exploration (SPEX), Netherlands Institute for Space Research
