ACEPOL AirHARP: Airborne Polarimetric Aerosol and Cloud Data

ACEPOL AirHARP data contains remotely sensed measurements from the Airborne Hyper Angular Rainbow Polarimeter instrument flown on NASA's ER-2 aircraft during the Fall 2017 ACEPOL campaign. The dataset was collected to assess polarimeter capabilities for retrieving aerosol and cloud microphysical and optical parameters over diverse U.S. scenes, including urban, desert, forest, coastal, and agricultural areas. It is part of a six-instrument suite that combined passive multi-angle polarimetry with active lidar measurements.

Use Cases

• Retrieving aerosol optical properties based on multi-angle, multi-spectral intensity and polarization measurements.
• Assessing cloud droplet distribution and cloud microphysics based on polarimetric observations.
• Deriving aerosol layer height using near-UV polarimetry and O2 A-band techniques described in the campaign goals.
• Benchmarking aerosol retrieval algorithms by comparing results from four different polarimeters deployed simultaneously.

Strengths

• Data was collected from a high-altitude ER-2 aircraft, enabling observations over a wide variety of scene types including urban, desert, forest, coastal ocean, and agricultural areas.
• Measurements are part of a coordinated six-instrument campaign (ACEPOL), allowing for synergistic analysis with lidar and other polarimeter data.
• The dataset appears on multiple platforms (NASA Earthdata and Data.gov), indicating its importance and curated status.

Limitations

• Column names and data structure are listed as 'unknown' across all platform entries, limiting immediate understanding of the data's internal organization.
• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific license terms are not provided in the available sources.
• The 'last updated' dates conflict between entries for the same dataset (2026-04-10 vs 2017-11-09), creating uncertainty about data currency.

Provenance

Source

NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center (LARC_ASDC)

Collection Method

Airborne remote sensing measurements collected by the AirHARP instrument onboard the NASA ER-2 aircraft.

Time Range

Fall 2017

Freshness

2026-04-10 19:02:16.576159

Geography

United States, with observations based out of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California.