ALBERT

Description: Satellite-based aerosol observation is a useful tool for the estimation of microphysical and optical characteristics of aerosol during more than three decades. Until now, a lot of satellite remote sensing techniques have been developed for aerosol detection. In East Asian region, the role of satellite observation is quite important because aerosols originating from natural and man-made pollution in this region have been recognized as an important source for regional and global scale air pollution. However, it is still difficult to retrieve aerosol over land because of the complexity of the surface reflection and complex aerosol composition, in particular, aerosol absorption. In this study, aerosol retrievals using Look-up Table (LUT) based method was applied to MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Level 1 (L1) calibrated reflectance data to retrieve aerosol optical thickness (AOT) over East Asia. Three case studies show how the methodology works to identify those differences to obtain a better AOT retrieval. The comparison between the MODIS and Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) shows better results when the suggested methodology using the cluster based LUTs is applied (linear slope=0.94, R=0.92) than when operational MODIS aerosol products are used (linear slope=0.78, R=0.87). In conclusion, the suggested methodology is shown to work well with aerosol models acquired by statistical clustering the observation data in East Asia.