Optical Characterization of Atmospheric Aerosols:

Monitoring, quantifying, and interpreting the sky states became important in the last decades, especially in metropolitan regions. Namely, the daylight availability in exterior and interior spaces can quickly change because of building boom in rapidly evolving countries. Therefore a few scientific teams simulate the daylight conditions in urban areas. Variable orientations and window sizes imply a necessity to evaluate the angular behaviour of sky luminance or radiance.

A plausible characterization of sky states is now a legitimate motivation for the systematic monitoring of the ground reaching radiation. The large effort is now in searching for a more universal and scalable daylight model accepting the actual meteorological situation. This can be achieved by introducing a set of parameters characterizing the physical state of both - the atmospheric and surrounding environments.

It needs to be highlighted that the real optical state of the atmosphere can neither be simulated by molecular scattering nor by single scattering approximation. It is partly due to aerosol particles and partly due to inhomogeneous clouds distributed irregularly in the Earth’s atmosphere. The aerosols are optically most unstable atmospheric constituents influencing the electromagnetic radiation in visible spectral range. Unfortunately, information on aerosol population is very important for correct classification of skies.

The optical effects by aerosols were therefore intensively analyzed by our team in close cooperation with several teams over the world. This activity resulted in organization of joint conference on Optical Characterization of Atmospheric Aerosols (OCAA-2013). Information on the conference can be found at the following link: http://ocaa2013.sav.sk/