Himawari-8-Derived Aerosol Optical Depth Using an Improved Time Series Algorithm Over Eastern China

Abstract

Himawari-8 (H8), as a new generation geostationary meteorological satellite, has great potential for monitoring the spatial–temporal variation of aerosol properties. However, the large amount of spectral data with differing observation geometries require re-formulation of the surface reflectance correction to utilize this new satellite data. This is achieved by using an improved version of the time series (TS) technique proposed by Mei et al., (2012) based on the assumption that the ratio of the surface reflectance in different spectral bands does not change between any two scan times within an hour. In addition, more suitable aerosol models were adopted, based on cluster analysis of local Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) data. The improved TS algorithm (ITS) was applied to retrieve the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) over eastern China and the results compare favorably with collocated reference AOD data at eleven sun photometer sites (R > 0.8, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) < 0.2). Comparison with the H8 official AOD product and with MODIS Dark Target (DT)–Deep Blue (DB) combined AOD data shows the good performance of the ITS method for AOD retrieval with different observation angles.