  Besides their own intrinsic interest, correct interpretation of solar surface
magnetic field observations is crucial to our ability to describe the global
magnetic structure of the solar atmosphere. Photospheric magnetograms are often
used as lower boundary conditions in models of the corona, but not data from
the nearly force-free chromosphere. National Solar Observatory's (NSO) Synoptic
Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun VSM (Vector Spectromagnetograph)
produces full-disk line-of-sight magnetic flux images deriving from both
photospheric and chromospheric layers on a daily basis. In this paper, we
investigate key properties of the magnetic field in these two layers using more
than five years of VSM data. We find from near-equatorial measurements that the
east-west inclination angle of most photospheric fields is less than about
12{\deg}, while chromospheric fields expand in all directions to a significant
degree. Using a simple stereoscopic inversion, we find evidence that
photospheric polar fields are also nearly radial but that during 2008 the
chromospheric field in the south pole was expanding superradially. We obtain a
spatially resolved polar photospheric flux distribution up to 80{\deg} latitude
whose strength increases poleward approximately as cosine(colatitude) to the
power 9-10. This distribution would give a polar field strength of 5-6 G. We
briefly discuss implications for future synoptic map construction and modeling.
