Aerosols from/for ocean color sensors

We intend to propose the effective procedure for aerosol retrieval for ocean color remote sensing. Ocean color sensors are designed to monitor the oceanic and atmospheric environments with near infrared (NIR) data as well as ocean color data. Aerosol properties such as optical thickness of aerosols. Angstrom exponent etc. are usually retrieved from reflectance observed in the NIR region based on one- or two- channel algorithm. In addition we found that polarization degree is useful to estimate such an optical constant of aerosols as refractive index, and polarized reflectance is especially available to retrieve the continental aerosols. It is of interest to mention that the aerosol retrieval is greatly improved once the observed quantities have been provided together with the sufficient directional information. Several algorithms for aerosol retrieval are examined and compared with each other using ocean color sensor data from CZCS to SeaWiFS.