The information content of skylight polarisation in MAX-DOAS trace gas and aerosol profiling applications
<p>Multi-AXis Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (MAX-DOAS) is a well-established ground-based measurement technique for the detection of atmospheric aerosol and trace gases: ultra-violet and visible radiation spectra of skylight are analyzed to obtain information on different atmospheric parameters. An appropriate set of spectra recorded under different viewing geometries ("Multi-Axis") allows retrieval of aerosol and trace gas vertical distributions by applying numerical inversion methods. Currently one of the method&#8217;s major limitations is the limited information content in the measurements that reduces the sensitivity particularly at higher altitudes.</p><p>It is well known but not yet used in MAX-DOAS profile retrievals that measuring skylight of different polarisation directions provides additional information: the degree of polarisation for instance strongly depends on the atmospheric aerosol content and the aerosol properties and &#8211; since the light path (?) differs for light of different polarisation -&#160; the set of geometries available for the inversion is extended. We present a novel polarization-sensitive MAX-DOAS instrument and a corresponding inversion algorithm, capable of using polarization information. Further, in contrast to existing MAX-DOAS algorithms consisting of separate aerosol and trace gas retrieval modules, our novel inversion scheme simultaneously retrieves aerosol and trace gas profiles of several species in a single step. The improvement over &#8220;unpolarised&#8221; MAX-DOAS approaches will be discussed, based on both, synthetic data and real measurements.</p>