Olejar Books

Aerosols have a significant influence on the Earth's radiation budget, but there is considerable uncertainty about their effect on the Earth's climate. Currently satellite remote sensing is being utilized to improve understanding of the effect of atmospheric aerosols on the climate system. To this end, a global dataset of aerosol properties are being produced from the ATSR-2 (Along-track Scanning Radiometer) and AATSR (Advanced Along-track Scanning Radiometer) missions which together span nearly 12 years from 1995 to 2007, and the AATSR mission is scheduled to continue until 2010. Atmospherically-corrected surface reflectance is also generated allowing quantitative analysis of the land surface properties. A simple physical model of light scattering is used to retrieve surface bi-directional reflectances and atmospheric aerosol properties. From the dual-angle top-of-atmosphere reflectances both the spectral and angular information can be utilised to solve the inverse problem and enable separation of the atmospheric and surface scattering contributions to the observed signal. For computational efficiency, the software uses pre-calculated lookup tables derived from an atmospheric radiative transfer model to allow for rapid inversion. Several satellite instruments monitor the aerosol composition of the planet. This is of importance both for better atmospheric correction of satellite images, climate change and also for air quality monitoring applications. Due to importance of the problem, more aerosol monitoring instruments will be launched in future. One example is the NASA Glory mission (http://glory.gsfc.nasa.gov/). Therefore, the overview of main results in the field of aerosol remote sensing over land is of great importance. This is the main topic of this book. Importantly, the book is written by the specialists working at the cutting edge of research in this area.