Abstract. The presence of melt ponds on the Arctic sea ice strongly affects the energy balance of the Arctic Ocean in summer. It affects albedo as well as transmittance through the sea ice, which has consequences for the heat balance and mass balance of sea ice. An algorithm to retrieve melt pond fraction and sea ice albedo from Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) data is validated against aerial, shipborne and in situ campaign data. The results show the best correlation for landfast and multiyear ice of high ice concentrations. For broadband albedo, R 2 is equal to 0.85, with the RMS (root mean square) being equal to 0.068; for the melt pond fraction, R 2 is equal to 0.36, with the RMS being equal to 0.065. The correlation for lower ice concentrations, subpixel ice floes, blue ice and wet ice is lower due to ice drift and challenging for the retrieval surface conditions. Combining all aerial observations gives a mean albedo RMS of 0.089 and a mean melt pond fraction RMS of 0.22. The in situ melt pond fraction correlation is R 2 = 0.52 with an RMS = 0.14. Ship cruise data might be affected by documentation of varying accuracy within the Antarctic Sea Ice Processes and Climate (ASPeCt) protocol, which may contribute to the discrepancy between the satellite value and the observed value: mean R 2 = 0.044, mean RMS = 0.16. An additional dynamic spatial cloud filter for MERIS over snow and ice has been developed to assist with the validation on swath data.

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a b s t r a c tIn this paper seven vector radiative transfer codes are inter-compared for the case of underlying black surface. They include three techniques based on the discrete ordinate method (DOM), two Monte-Carlo methods, the successive orders scattering method, and a modified doubling-adding technique. It was found that all codes give very similar results. Therefore, we were able to produce benchmark results for the Stokes parameters both for reflected and transmitted light in the cases of molecular, aerosol and cloudy multiply scattering media. It was assumed that the single scattering albedo is equal to one. Benchmark results have been provided by several studies before, including Coulson et al. [22], Garcia and Siewert [7,8], Wauben and Hovenier [10], and Natraj et al. [11] among others. However, the case of the elongated phase functions such as for a cloud and with a high angular resolution is presented here for the first time. Also in difference with other studies, we make inter-comparisons using several codes for the same input dataset, which enables us to quantify the corresponding errors more accurately.