Spatial–Temporal Fusion of 10-Min Aerosol Optical Depth Products with the GEO–LEO Satellite Joint Observations

Abstract

Geosynchronous equatorial orbit (GEO) satellite-derived AOD possesses huge advantages for monitoring atmospheric aerosol with high frequency; however, the data missing existing in the satellite-derived AOD products dramatically limits this expected advantage due to cloud obscuration and aerosol retrieval algorithm. In recent years, numerous AOD fusion algorithms have been proposed, while these algorithms are mostly developed to blend daily AOD products derived from low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and generally neglect discrepancies from different categories of products. Therefore, a spatiotemporal fusion framework based on the Bayesian maximum entropy theorem, blending GEO with LEO satellite observations and incorporating data discrepancies (GL-BME), is developed to complementarily recover the Advanced Himawari-8 Imager (AHI) AOD products over East Asia. The results show that GL-BME significantly improves the average spatial completeness of AOD from 20.3% to 67.6% with ensured reliability, and the accuracy of merged AODs nearly maintains that of original AHI AODs. Moreover, a comparison of the monthly aerosol spatial distribution between the merged and original AHI AODs is conducted to evaluate the performance and significance of GL-BME, which indicates that GL-BME could further restore the real atmospheric aerosol situation to a certain extent on the basis of dramatic spatial coverage improvement.

Keywords

• GEO–LEO
• AOD fusion
• discrepancy quantification
• Himawari-8 AHI