Validating PACE aerosol columnar properties and OCI water-leaving radiances from ground-based network spectroradiometer measurements

Multiple units of in-house built SMART-s (Spectral Measurements for Atmospheric Radiative Transfer-spectrometer, 330870 nm at ~0.8 nm resolution), as a part of NASA/Pandora network with extended spectral range, will be deployed to support PACE validation over oceanic waters (Eureka Oil Platform, CA; ~8 miles off the coast of Long Beach, CA) and seasonal transported Asian dust, southeastern biomass-burning smoke, and locally generated industrial air pollutants such as trace gases, precursors, and aerosols (Taiwan) sites. Specifically, we propose to accomplish the following two tasks:1. To evaluate OCI's atmospheric-corrected water-leaving radiance/reflectance: Since the scans of SMART-s are very flexible and programmable, we will initially adopt the AERONET-OC operational criteria (e.g., IOCCG, 2019; Zibordi et al., 2021) for data continuity and consistency checks; then, after accumulating enough lessons learned from SeaPRISM, the advantage of SMART-s spectrometry will help improving the spatial-spectral-temporal sampling efficiency and effectiveness for PACE/OCI intercomparison (validation) and application. These water-leaving radiance/reflectance will be integrated with OCI's spectral response functions to meet their spectral range (i.e., 17 bands in 350710 nm at 15 nm bandwidth; 665/678 nm at 10 nm bandwidth) and uncertainty requirements.2. To validate PACEs aerosol and cloud products: We will utilize well-calibrated SMART-s' direct-Sun and sky measurements with SMART-s published methods (Jeong et al., 2018, 2020, and 2022) to retrieve columnar properties of aerosols (e.g., spectral AOD, single-scattering albedo, and ngstrm exponent, fine-mode fraction of complex index of refraction) and abundance of trace gases (O3, NO2, H2Ovapor). By leveraging the assets of the upcoming 7-SEAS (Seven SouthEast Asian Studies, 20242026, Taiwan in collaborating NASA AERONET/ MPLNET) international field campaigns, SMART-s measurements can be maximized for improving scientific understanding and validating PACE/OCI products.