A semi-empirical optical data fusion technique for merging aerosol optical depth over China

Abstract

MODIS and MISR are two main satellites provide aerosol observations. However, AOD products generated from these two sensors by different retrieval algorithms are inconsistent. In this paper, a semi-empirical optical fusion method was proposed to produce consistent AOD with different derived AOD datasets form MODIS and MISR. Using the semi-empirical optical algorithm, new merged AOD data sets were generated over China for 2010. We used level 2 cloud screened quality assured AERONET measurements to evaluate the merged AOD results. Our results showed that the combination of MODIS and MISR with this method could produce a more consistent, reliable AOD data with great improvement in spatial AOD coverage.