Friday, 7 June 2002: 3:45 PM
Photon pathlength distributions derived from a high resolution spectrometer (AWS)
A high resolution oxygen A-band and 820 nm water vapor band spectrometer
has been developed and deployed in a field campaign at the ARM SGP site.
The resolution of this instrument is 0.025 nm with out of band rejection
better than 10^-5. Given the performance of the instrument, we
retrieved the photon pathlength distributions in both bands.
The joint statistics of photon pathlength moments (mean and variance)
and cloud optical properties has been studied.
Preliminary results demonstrate that information derived from photon
pathlength distributions is a powerful diagnostic tool for sky
homogeneity and can provide constraints for radiative transfer
calculation in cloudy atmospheres. Furthermore, the role of cloud and
aerosol on scattering and absortion processes in the atmosphere can be
studied by using simultaneous high resolution measurements from oxygen
A-band and 820 nm water vapor band.
Supplementary URL: