Aerosol Indices Derived from MODIS Data for Indicating Aerosol-Induced Air Pollution

Remote Sensing

Junliang He¹  Yong Zha¹  Jiahua Zhang² 

[1]Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment, Ministry of Education, College of Geographic Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210097, China

[2] E-Mail:

[3]Lab. of Digital Earth Sciences, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China

关键词: aerosol indices;    air pollution;    6S model;    MODIS;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs6021587

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Aerosol optical depth (AOD) is a critical variable in estimating aerosol concentration in the atmosphere, evaluating severity of atmospheric pollution, and studying their impact on climate. With the assistance of the 6S radiative transfer model, we simulated apparent reflectancein relation to AOD in each Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) waveband in this study. The closeness of the relationship was used to identify the most and least sensitive MODIS wavebands. These two bands were then used to construct three aerosol indices (difference, ratio, and normalized difference) for estimating AOD quickly and effectively. The three indices were correlated, respectively, with in situ measured AOD at the Aerosol Robotic NETwork (AERONET) Lake Taihu, Beijing, and Xianghe stations. It is found that apparent reflectance of the blue waveband (band 3) is the most sensitive to AOD while the mid-infrared wavelength (band 7) is the least sensitive. The difference aerosol index is the most accurate in indicating aerosol-induced atmospheric pollution with a correlation coefficient of 0.585, 0.860, 0.685, and 0.333 at the Lake Taihu station, 0.721, 0.839, 0.795, and 0.629 at the Beijing station, and 0.778, 0.782, 0.837, and 0.643 at the Xianghe station in spring, summer, autumn and winter, respectively. It is concluded that the newly proposed difference aerosol index can be used effectively to study the level of aerosol-induced air pollution from MODIS satellite imagery with relative ease.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland