Retrieval of the Fine-Mode Aerosol Optical Depth over East China Using a Grouped Residual Error Sorting (GRES) Method from Multi-Angle and Polarized Satellite Data

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Yang Zhang, Zhengqiang Li, Zhihong Liu, Juan Zhang, Lili Qie, Yisong Xie, Weizhen Hou, Yongqian Wang, Zhixiang Ye
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018
• Subjects: multi-angular remote sensing; polarized remote sensing; fine-mode aerosol optical depth; optimal aerosol model determination; PARASOL; Science; Q; Aerosol Robotic Network
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10111838; https://doaj.org/article/23d8e6633a6a472cb085dd394da6f1ca

The fine-mode aerosol optical depth (AOD f ) is an important parameter for the environment and climate change study, which mainly represents the anthropogenic aerosols component. The Polarization and Anisotropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Science coupled with Observations from a Lidar (PARASOL) instrument can detect polarized signal from multi-angle observation and the polarized signal mainly comes from the radiation contribution of the fine-mode aerosols, which provides an opportunity to obtain AOD f directly. However, the currently operational algorithm of Laboratoire d’Optique Atmosphérique (LOA) has a poor AOD f retrieval accuracy over East China on high aerosol loading days. This study focused on solving this issue and proposed a grouped residual error sorting (GRES) method to determine the optimal aerosol model in AOD f retrieval using the traditional look-up table (LUT) approach and then the AOD f retrieval accuracy over East China was improved. The comparisons between the GRES retrieved and the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) ground-based AOD f at Beijing, Xianghe, Taihu and Hong_Kong_PolyU sites produced high correlation coefficients (r) of 0.900, 0.933, 0.957 and 0.968, respectively. The comparisons of the GRES retrieved AOD f and PARASOL AOD f product with those of the AERONET observations produced a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.054 versus 0.104 on high aerosol loading days (AERONET mean AOD f at 865 nm = 0.283). An application using the GRES method for total AOD (AOD t ) retrieval also showed a good expandability for multi-angle aerosol retrieval of this method.