Mixing weight determination for retrieving optical properties of polluted dust with MODIS and AERONET data

In this study, an approach in determining effective mixing weight of soot aggregates from dust–soot aerosols is proposed to improve the accuracy of retrieving properties of polluted dusts by means of satellite remote sensing. Based on a pre-computed database containing several variables (such as wav...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Environmental Research Letters
Main Authors: Kuo-En Chang, Ta-Chih Hsiao, N Christina Hsu, Neng-Huei Lin, Sheng-Hsiang Wang, Gin-Rong Liu, Chian-Yi Liu, Tang-Huang Lin
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing 2016
Subjects:
mixing weight
dust-soot aerosols
MODIS
AOD
SSA
AERONET
Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering
TD1-1066
Environmental sciences
GE1-350
Science
Q
Physics
QC1-999
Aerosol Robotic Network
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/085002
https://doaj.org/article/9401b3d40bd240ad987fe0746c4b2e14
Description
Summary:In this study, an approach in determining effective mixing weight of soot aggregates from dust–soot aerosols is proposed to improve the accuracy of retrieving properties of polluted dusts by means of satellite remote sensing. Based on a pre-computed database containing several variables (such as wavelength, refractive index, soot mixing weight, surface reflectivity, observation geometries and aerosol optical depth (AOD)), the fan-shaped look-up tables can be drawn out accordingly for determining the mixing weights, AOD and single scattering albedo (SSA) of polluted dusts simultaneously with auxiliary regional dust properties and surface reflectivity. To validate the performance of the approach in this study, 6 cases study of polluted dusts (dust–soot aerosols) in Lower Egypt and Israel were examined with the ground-based measurements through AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET). The results show that the mean absolute differences could be reduced from 32.95% to 6.56% in AOD and from 2.67% to 0.83% in SSA retrievals for MODIS aerosol products when referenced to AERONET measurements, demonstrating the soundness of the proposed approach under different levels of dust loading, mixing weight and surface reflectivity. Furthermore, the developed algorithm is capable of providing the spatial distribution of the mixing weights and removing the requirement to assume that the dust plume properties are uniform. The case study further shows the spatially variant dust–soot mixing weight would improve the retrieval accuracy in AOD _mixture and SSA _mixture about 10.0% and 1.4% respectively.

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