The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Publications Copernicus
Download
Citation
Articles | Volume XLI-B8
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLI-B8-277-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLI-B8-277-2016
23 Jun 2016
 | 23 Jun 2016

A NOVEL INDEX FOR ATMOSPHERIC AEROSOL TYPES CATEGORIZATION WITH SPECTRAL OPTICAL DEPTHS FROM SATELLITE RETRIEVAL

Tang-Huang Lin, Gin-Rong Liu, and Chian-Yi Liu

Keywords: AOD, SSA, Aerosol Type, NGAI, MODIS, AERONET

Abstract. In general, the type of atmospheric aerosols can be efficiently identified with the characteristics of optical properties, such as Ångström exponent (AE) and single scattering albedo (SSA). However, the retrieval of SSA is not frequently available to global area which may cause the difficulty in the identification of aerosol type. Since aerosol optical depth (AOD) can be easily requested, a novel index in terms of AOD, Normalized Gradient Aerosol Index (NGAI), is proposed to get over the constraint on SSA providing. With the NGAI derived from MODIS AOD products, the type of atmospheric aerosols can be clearly categorized between mineral dusts, biomass burning and anthropogenic pollutants. The results of aerosol type categorization show the well agreement with the ground-based observations (AERONET) in AE and SSA properties, implying that the proposed index equips highly practical for the application of aerosols type categorization by means of remote sensing. In addition, the fraction of AOD compositions can be potentially determined according to the value of index after compared with the products of CALIPSO Aerosol Subtype.