Spatial Distribution of Aerosol Optical Thickness Retrieved from SeaWiFS Images by a Neural Network Inversion over the West African Coast

• Main Authors: Diouf, Daouda, Niang, Awa, Brajard, Julien, Sawadogo, Salam, Crépon, Michel, Thiria, Sylvie
• Other Authors: École Supérieure Polytechnique de Dakar (ESP), Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar Sénégal (UCAD), Coupling environmental data and simulation models for software integration (CLIME), Inria de Paris, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria), Processus de la variabilité climatique tropicale et impacts (PARVATI), Laboratoire d'Océanographie et du Climat : Expérimentations et Approches Numériques (LOCEAN), Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut Pierre-Simon-Laplace (IPSL (FR_636)), École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 (UPD7)-École polytechnique (X)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 (UPD7)-École polytechnique (X)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut Pierre-Simon-Laplace (IPSL (FR_636)), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 (UPD7)-École polytechnique (X)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2016
• Subjects: West African coast; absorbing aerosols; neural networks; [SDU.OCEAN]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Ocean; Atmosphere; Aerosol Robotic Network
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-01507520; https://hal.science/hal-01507520/document; https://hal.science/hal-01507520/file/52970.pdf; https://doi.org/10.5772/65874

International audience Aerosol optical thickness (AOT) was provided by SeaWiFS over oceans from October 1997 to December 2010. Weekly, monthly, and annually maps might help scientifics to better understand climate change and its impacts. Making average of several images to get these maps is not suitable on West African coast. A particularity of this area is that it is constantly traversed by desert dust. The algorithm used by SeaWiFS inverts the reflectance measurements to retrieve the aerosol optical thickness at 865 nm. For the poorly absorbing aerosol optical thickness less than 0.35, the standard algorithm works very well. On the west African coast that is often crossed by desert aerosol plumes characterized by high optical thicknesses. In this paper we study the spatial and temporal variability of aerosols on the West African coast during the period from December 1997 to November 2009 by using neural network inversion. The neural network method we used is mixed method of neuro-variational inversion called SOM-NV. It is an evolution of NeuroVaria that is a combination of a variational inversion and multilayer perceptrons, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). This work also enables validation of the optical thickness retrieved by SOM-NV with AOT in situ measurements collected at AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) stations.