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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Remote Sens.

Sec. Atmospheric Remote Sensing

Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsen.2025.1689824

This article is part of the Research TopicInstruments and Technologies for Earth Observation Satellite MissionsView all 4 articles

Application of Radon Transform to multi-angle measurements made by the Research Scanning Polarimeter: A new approach to cloud tomography. Part II: Examples of retrievals from CAMP2Ex dataset

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Columbia University, New York City, United States
  • 2SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, Netherlands
  • 3Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, United States
  • 4Autonomic Integra LLC, New York, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

In Part II of the series we present results of application of our recently developed tomographic technique to real measurements made by the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP). This instrument served as a prototype for the Aerosol Polarimetery Sensor (APS) launched on-board the NASA Glory satellite. The retrieval algorithms developed for the RSP were adopted for analysis of the measurements by the space-borne polarimeters on the recently launched NASA's Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud Ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite. The RSP is an airborne along-track scanner with uniquely high angular resolution and high frequency of measurements. Besides characterization of liquid-water cloud droplet sizes the RSP observations also provide for derivation of 2D fields of extinction coefficient inside the cloud using a tomographic technique described in Part I of the series. This technique utilizes the family of cloud shapes derived using "cutout" method, which can be interpreted as level curves of an abstract "reflectance density". The latter is then used for derivation of the directional cloud optical thickness (dCOT) tomogram, a collection of dCOTs parameterized by the angles and offsets of the view rays (chords). After this, the inverse Radon Transform (the mathematical basis of the X-ray computer tomography) is applied to the dCOT tomogram yielding 2D spatial distribution of the extinction coefficient. The later can be converted into droplet number concentration using the droplet size profiles derived from the RSP's polarized reflectance measurements. After successful tests on synthetic data, this technique was applied to real RSP measurements from NASA's Cloud, Aerosol and Monsoon Processes Philippines Experiment (CAMP2Ex) conducted in the vicinity of the Philippines during the Southwest Monsoon (August–September 2019). We have investigated the interiors of a number of clouds observed during CAMP2Ex focusing on Cu and CuCg (Tcu) cases, two of which are presented in this paper. Our retrievals were compared with Alexandrov et al. RSP cloud tomography the correlative measurements by lidar (HSRL-2) and cloud radar (APR-3) that were deployed on the same airborne platform (NASA's P-3B) during this field experiment.

Keywords: Clouds, Tomography, Radon transform, research scanning polarimeter, reflectance, Airborne Remote Sensing

Received: 21 Aug 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Alexandrov, Van Diedenhoven, Cairns and Wasilewski. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mikhail Alexandrov, mda14@columbia.edu

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