High resolution aerosol data from MODIS satellite for urban air quality studies

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) provides daily global coverage, but the 10 km resolution of its aerosol optical depth (AOD) product is not suitable for studying spatial variability of aerosols in urban areas. Recently, a new Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC) algorithm was developed for MODIS which provides AOD at 1 km resolution. Using MAIAC data, the relationship between MAIAC AOD and PM2.5 as measured by the 27 EPA ground monitoring stations was investigated. These results were also compared to conventional MODIS 10 km AOD retrievals (MOD04) for the same days and locations. The coefficients of determination for MOD04 and for MAIAC are R2 =0.45 and 0.50 respectively, suggested that AOD is a reasonably good proxy for PM2.5 ground concentrations. Finally, we studied the relationship between PM2.5 and AOD at the intra-urban scale (⩽10 km) in Boston. The fine resolution results indicated spatial variability in particle concentration at a sub-10 kilometer scale. A local analysis for the Boston area showed that the AOD-PM2.5 relationship does not depend on relative humidity and air temperatures below ∼7 °C. The correlation improves for temperatures above 7–16 °C. We found no dependence on the boundary layer height except when the former was in the range 250–500 m. Finally, we apply a mixed effects model approach to MAIAC aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrievals from MODIS to predict PM2.5 concentrations within the greater Boston area. With this approach we can control for the inherent day-to-day variability in the AOD-PM2.5 relationship, which depends on time-varying parameters such as particle optical properties, vertical and diurnal concentration profiles and ground surface reflectance. Our results show that the model-predicted PM2.5 mass concentrations are highly correlated with the actual observations (out-of-sample R2 of 0.86). Therefore, adjustment for the daily variability in the AOD-PM2.5 relationship provides a means for obtaining spatially-resolved PM2.5 concentrations.