Aerus-GEO: newly available satellite-derived aerosol optical depth product over Europe and Africa

Abstract:

The major difficulty in detecting the aerosol signal from visible and near-infrared remote sensing observations is to reach the proper separation of the components related to the atmosphere and the surface. A method is proposed to circumvent this issue by exploiting the directional and temporal dimensions of the satellite signal through the use of a semi-empirical kernel-driven model for the surface/atmosphere coupled system. This algorithm was implemented by the ICARE Data Center (http://www.icare.univ-lille1.fr), which operationally disseminates a daily AOD product at 670 nm over the MSG disk since 2014. The proposed method referred to as AERUS-GEO (Aerosol and surface albEdo Retrieval Using a directional Splitting method - application to GEO data) is applied to three spectral bands (0.6 mm, 0.8 mm, and 1.6 mm) of MSG (Meteosat Second Generation) observations, which scan Europe, Africa, and the Eastern part of South America every 15 minutes. The daily AOD estimates at 0.63μm has been extensively validated. In contrast, the Angstrom coefficient is still going through validation and we will show the differences between the MSG derived Angstrom exponent with that of CAMS (Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service) near-real time aerosol product. The impact of aerosol type on the aerosol radiative forcing will be presented as a part of future development plan.