Aerosols remote sensing capability has been greatly improved with the POLDER-1 space-borne instrument, mainly over land surfaces using the polarization. Polarized radiances measured at 0.67 µm and 0.865 µm have been shown to be useful to detect the main anthropogenic aerosol sources located over land. Nevertheless, the lack of measurement beyond 0.865 µm prevents, finally, from getting, more accurate determination of aerosol properties over land.

The ground polarized contribution should be directly derived from measurements performed at longer wavelength, up to 2.2 µm. Over ocean also, spectral extension toward middle infrared is quite important to more precisely derive aerosol properties. More recent theoretical studies and experimental studies also outline the usefullness of additional middle infrared polarimetric measurements. We present here a new polarimeter designed for the preparation POLDER New-Generation instrument understudy by CNES. This instrument, called microPOL, has been developped at LOA with the support of CNES.