<title>Effect of polarization on the application of radiometric calibration coefficients to infrared earth scenes</title>

Recent efforts in Earth remote sensing have focused on accurately measuring to-of-atmosphere and surface-leaving radiances. When applying calibration coefficients to such scenes, one must account for the differences in polarization between the calibration target, used to determine the calibration coefficients, and the scene itself. Generally, this has not been done for measurements of infrared Earth scenes. This paper derives the impact of polarization on the radiometric calibration coefficients using the Stokes vector formalism, gives the result of the derivation using the Jones vector formalism, and accounts for the instrument polarization sensitivity, calibration target polarization, and scene polarization through normalization. The expected infrared polarization of Earth scenes is reviewed.