Atmospheric Aerosols Monitoring: Ground and Satellite-Based Instruments

Aerosols are submicron particles suspended in the atmosphere which affect Earth’s energy balance directly by scattering and absorbing the of solar radiation. In addition, they can indirectly affect radiation balance by changing the micro-physical and optical properties of the cloud. The difficulties in accessing the contribution of aerosols to radiative balance are caused partly due to incomplete knowledge of spatiotemporal variabilities in physicochemical and optical properties of aerosols on regional to global scale. Several state-of-the-art instrumentation techniques for ground-based measurements and satellite remote sensing technologies have been developed in past three decades to monitor physicochemical and optical properties of aerosols for a better understanding of radiative balance and feedback mechanisms. Satellite retrievals of moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS), ozone monitoring instrument (OMI), multi-angle imaging spectroradiometer (MISR) are used for this purpose. Ground-based measurements of aerosol properties provide a basis for validation of atmospheric correction procedures and can be used for validation of aerosol models used in atmospheric correction algorithms. This chapter describes in details about the widely used ground- and satellite-based remote sensing instruments for aerosol monitoring.