Radiative transfer. II. Impact of meteorological variables and surface albedo on atmospheric optical properties retrieved from ground-based multispectral measurements.

In a companion paper we describe a radiative transfer model and a consequent algorithm for retrieving atmospheric variables from ground-based multispectral measurements of direct solar irradiance. The accuracy of retrieved data depends on measured spectral irradiance as well as surface meteorological variables. Here we analyze the impact of the surface albedo on diffuse scattered solar irradiance in the Sun-sensor direction. We also investigate the impact of visibility on the retrieved spectral transmission function and optical thickness. We discuss the application of a spectrometric system, the passive pyrheliometric scanner (PPS), for the estimation of atmospheric turbidity and visibility. The spectral transmission of the atmosphere derived with the PPS for the Athens atmosphere and for different zenith angles is given. We present results of retrieved aerosol optical properties using as atmospheric turbidity those values estimated from the ground-based measurements of direct solar radiation with the aid of the PPS. It is shown that another application of the PPS may be the estimation of horizontal visibility.