Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-21-2021

Department

Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences

Abstract

The Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite observes the entire Sun-illuminated Earth from sunrise to sunset from the L1 Sun-Earth Lagrange point. The L1 location, however, confines the observed phase angles to ∼2°–12°, a nearly backscattering direction, precluding any information on the bidirectional surface reflectance factor (BRF) or cloud/aerosol phase function. Deploying an analog of EPIC on the Moon’s surface would offer a unique opportunity to image the full range of Earth phases, including observing ocean/cloud glint reflection for different phase angles; monitoring of transient volcanic clouds; detection of circum-polar mesospheric and stratospheric clouds; estimating the surface BRF and full phase-angle integrated albedo; and monitoring of vegetation characteristics for different phase angles.

Publisher's Statement

Copyright © 2021 Gorkavyi, Carn, DeLand, Knyazikhin, Krotkov, Marshak, Myneni and Vasilkov.

Publication Title

Frontiers in Remote Sensing

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

Publisher's PDF

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