The COLOR core activity is the characterization of the signal from the AEOLUS ground bin that is generated by the interaction of the emitted laser radiation with two media (atmosphere and ocean) and their interface (eq. 1).
This characterization will be based on two parallel and strongly interacting activities:
a) Radiative transfer numerical modelling. This tool will be essential to simulate the relevant radiative processes expected to be responsible for the generation of AEOLUS surface bin signal.
b) AEOLUS data analysis. The objective of this activity will be to verify the information content of the AEOLUS ground bin signals and the assumptions for data product retrieval.
These two activities are needed to verify if and in which terms the ocean lidar retrieval approaches can be applied to the ALADIN instrumental and sampling characteristics, which were planned and optimized to retrieve atmospheric parameters.
The retrieval algorithm will be then structured in three independent and consecutive phases:
1) Pre-processing analysis: aimed to identify suitable measurements to be inverted;
2) Estimation of the in-water ground bin signal contribution: aimed to remove contributions to the measured signal from variables other that the in-water ones; 3) Retrieval of in-water ground bin optical properties: aimed to estimate the targeted in-water optical properties
