Validation of aerosol optical depth and total ozone column in the ultraviolet retrieved from multifilter rotating shadowband radiometer

Aerosol optical depth (AOD), aerosol single scattering albedo (SSA), and asymmetry factor (g) at seven ultraviolet wavelengths along with total column ozone (TOC) were retrieved based on Bayesian optimal estimation (OE) from the measurements of the UltraViolet Multifilter Rotating Shadowband Radiometer (UV-MFRSR) deployed at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site during March to November in 2009. To assess the accuracy of the OE technique, the AOD retrievals are compared to both the Beer's law derived ones and the AErosol RObotic Network (AERONET) AOD product; and the TOC retrievals are compared to both the TOC product of the U.S. Department of Agriculture UV-B Monitoring and Research Program (USDA UVMRP) and the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) satellite data. The scatterplots of the AOD estimated by the OE method with the Beer's law derived ones and the collocated AERONET AOD product both show a very good agreement: the correlation coefficients vary between 0.98 and 0.99; the slopes range from 0.95 to 1.0; and the offsets are less than 0.02 at 368 nm. The comparison of TOC also shows a promising accuracy of the OE method: the standard deviations of the difference between the OE derived TOC and other TOC products are about 5 to 6 Dobson Units (DU). The validation of the OE retrievals on the selected dates suggests the OE technique has its merits and is a supplemental tool in analyzing UVMRP data.