Unveiling non-gray surface of cloudy exoplanets: the influence of wavelength-dependent surface albedo and cloud scattering properties on retrieval solutions

TL;DR

This study investigates how wavelength-dependent surface albedo and cloud scattering influence spectral retrievals of cloudy exoplanets, highlighting the importance of multi-band observations and prior constraints for accurate atmospheric and surface characterization.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of wavelength-dependent surface albedo on retrieval accuracy and explores methods to mitigate degeneracies between cloud and surface properties in exoplanet spectra.

Findings

Surface albedo can be reasonably recovered with known cloud properties.

Degeneracy between cloud and surface properties causes biased retrievals when cloud scattering is unknown.

Multi-epoch UV and visible observations improve atmospheric property constraints.

Abstract

Direct-imaging spectra hold rich information about a planet's atmosphere and surface, and several space-based missions aiming at such observations will become a reality in the near future. Previous spectral retrieval works have resulted in key atmospheric constraints under the assumption of a gray surface, but the effect of wavelength-dependent surface albedo on retrieval has not been shown. We explore the influence of the coupling effect of cloud and wavelength-dependent surface albedo on retrieval performance via modeling suites of Earth-like atmospheres with varying cloud and surface albedo parameterizations. Under the assumption of known cloud scattering properties, the surface spectral albedos can be reasonably recovered when the surface cover represents that of Earth-like vegetation or ocean, which may aid in characterizing the planet's habitability. When the cloud scattering properties cannot be assumed, we show that the degeneracy between the cloud properties and wavelength-dependent surface albedo leads to biased results of atmospheric and cloud properties. The multi-epoch visible band observations offer limited improvement in disentangling this degeneracy. However, the constraints on atmospheric properties from the combination of UV band (R $\sim 6$) $+$ visible band (R $\sim 140$) are consistent with input values to within 1 $\sigma$. If short bandpass data is not available, an alternative solution to reduce the retrieval uncertainties would be to have the prior constraints on planetary cloud fraction with less than 20% uncertainty.