Directional Polarization Camera

Directional Polarization Camera (DPC) is an operational passive VIS/NIR camera on GF-5 for multi-angle, multi-polarization observations of aerosol properties, cloud microphysical parameters, and bidirectional reflectance distribution function measurements.^[1][2] It measures 8 VIS/NIR wavelengths across 443-910 nm, with 14 total channels because selected wavelengths include three polarization measurements.^[1][2] Its non-polarized bands are 443, 565, 763, 765, and 910 nm, and its polarized bands are 490, 670, and 865 nm.^[2] The instrument paper reports at least 9 viewing directions, which is central to its multi-angle polarimetry use case over land and cloud scenes.^[2]

The swath and sampling figures remain an unresolved discrepancy between sources: WMO OSCAR records a 2400 km swath with 3.5 km sub-satellite sampling, while Li et al. 2018 reports a 1850 km swath with 3.3 km nadir sampling, so the published figures disagree.^[1][3][2] Multi-angle polarimetry is demonstrated on Gaofen-5 for DPC.^[1]