Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
POLDER 3 is a multispectral and multidirectional imaging radiometer/polarimeter, the third instrument of the POLarization and Directionality of Earth Reflectances family. It is designed to collect global images of the earth/atmosphere reflectances with a wide field of view of 1600 km and a moderate spatial resolution of 6 km. It was developed and successfully launched onboard the PARASOL microsatellite by the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (the French Space Agency) on December 18, 2004, and the first images were acquired on January 7, 2005. The nominal acquisition phase has started on march 10, 2005 after a successful flight commissioning phase. The specificity of this instrument is to measure polarized reflectances for three out of the 10 spectral channels from 443 to 1020 nm, from 16 viewing directions during a single satellite pass. The purpose of this paper is to present the preliminary ocean color scientific products: marine diffuse reflectances, amount and type of aerosols derived from the atmospheric correction scheme and concentration of chlorophyll pigments. The level 3 products will be compared to another ocean color instruments, MODIS.
Steinmetz et al. (Thu,) studied this question.