Combined neural network/Phillips–Tikhonov approach to aerosol retrievals over land from the NASA Research Scanning Polarimeter

Abstract. In this paper, an algorithm for the retrieval of aerosol and land surface properties from airborne spectropolarimetric measurements – combining neural networks and an iterative scheme based on Phillips–Tikhonov regularization – is described. The algorithm – which is an extension of a scheme previously designed for ground-based retrievals – is applied to measurements from the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP) on board the NASA ER-2 aircraft. A neural network, trained on a large data set of synthetic measurements, is applied to perform aerosol retrievals from real RSP data, and the neural network retrievals are subsequently used as a first guess for the Phillips–Tikhonov retrieval. The resulting algorithm appears capable of accurately retrieving aerosol optical thickness, fine-mode effective radius and aerosol layer height from RSP data. Among the advantages of using a neural network as initial guess for an iterative algorithm are a decrease in processing time and an increase in the number of converging retrievals.