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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-834</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A BPDF database retrieved using multi-angle, multispectral and polarimetric observations from POLDER-3 and DPC-2</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ji</surname>
<given-names>Zhe</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7003-9506</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Zhengqiang</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>de Leeuw</surname>
<given-names>Gerrit</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1649-6333</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Cheng</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7768-9542</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Che</surname>
<given-names>Yahui</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Zihan</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2544-4487</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Luo</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff7">
<sup>7</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth &amp; Key Laboratory of Satellite Remote Sensing of Ministry of  Ecology and Environment, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Spatial Datum, College of Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics Engineering, Faculty of Geographical  Science and Engineering, Henan University, Zhengzhou, 450046, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), R&amp;D Satellite Observations, P.O.Box 201, 3730AE De Bilt, The Netherlands</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>Institute for Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff7">
<label>7</label>
<addr-line>Satellite Application Center for Ecology and Environment, Ministry of Ecology and Environment, Beijing 100094, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>04</day>
<month>11</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>40</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Zhe Ji et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-834/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-834/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-834/essd-2026-834.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-834/essd-2026-834.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>The bidirectional polarization distribution function (BPDF) characterizes the dependence of land-surface polarized reflectance on illumination and viewing geometry and provides a key surface boundary condition for polarimetric retrievals of aerosol properties. In recent years, the increasing number of polarimeters in orbit has stimulated growing interest in polarized surface reflectance. Reliable multisensor BPDF databases are therefore urgently needed. However, deriving surface polarized reflectance that is comparable across spectral bands and sensors remains challenging. Earlier databases generally corrected only for molecular scattering and adopted the 865 nm results as the final surface polarized reflectance, assuming that aerosol effects were negligible under low aerosol loading and that a single band adequately represented surface polarization. This approach neither explicitly accounted for aerosol effects nor exploited the weak spectral dependence of land-surface polarized reflectance. In fact, even under low-aerosol-loading conditions, across the POLDER-3 and DPC-2 observations used in this study, the relative differences between surface polarized reflectance obtained using molecular-only correction and that obtained by accounting for both molecular and aerosol effects exceeded 10 % in approximately 60 %&amp;ndash;75 % of the observations at 490, 670 and 865 nm. Moreover, global BPDF studies have relied primarily on POLDER observations. Because most existing studies use observations from 2005&amp;ndash;2013, their results may not adequately represent current land-surface conditions. Newly operational polarimeters therefore require an atmospheric-correction method applicable across-sensors to update existing BPDF records and support future BPDF studies. In addition, the effects of mixing among different surface types on BPDF remain poorly understood. Here, we developed a unified atmospheric-correction framework that uses Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) aerosol optical depth and vector radiative transfer calculations together with vector radiative-transfer calculations to account for the effects of both atmospheric molecules and aerosols. After correcting the multiband observations, the spectral consistency of the multiband surface polarized reflectance was substantially improved. On this basis, we used weighted fusion to derive a common estimate of surface polarized reflectance from the three corrected bands. The framework was applied to POLDER-3 observations from 2005&amp;ndash;2013 and DPC-2 observations from 2022&amp;ndash;2023, producing two quality-flagged BPDF databases. The database is publicly available and registered at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.015ek&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;noopener&quot;&gt;doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.015ek&lt;/a&gt;. For the cross-sensor evaluation, directional observations acquired under similar surface and observation conditions were matched between the two sensors. The matched directional observations yielded correlation coefficients of 0.60 to 0.87 across 12 International Geosphere&amp;ndash;Biosphere Programme (IGBP) land-cover classes, showing clear positive correspondence under similar surface and observation conditions despite the nearly decade-long separation between the two sensor records. The subpixel analysis further showed that the higher-resolution DPC-2 observation sequences were generally more homogeneous, with a mean dominant land-cover fraction 5.8 percentage points higher than that of POLDER-3. After accounting for observation geometry, a lower dominant land-cover fraction was associated with lower surface polarized reflectance, with a greater decrease for POLDER-3 than for DPC-2, indicating a stronger association between surface polarized reflectance and subpixel composition at coarser spatial resolution. The direction of this relationship varied among land-cover classes, showing that subpixel mixing does not produce a uniform monotonic shift but also depends on the polarization contrast between dominant and secondary surface components. By developing a unified atmospheric-correction framework, this study extends BPDF database construction from single-band and single-sensor processing to multiband and multisensor applications. The resulting framework provides a foundation for updating historical BPDF records, developing long-term multisensor records of land-surface polarized reflectance, and improving the surface boundary conditions used in atmospheric polarimetric retrievals.</p>
</abstract>
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