Long-term trend of aerosol optical depth derived from MODIS Aqua using linear regression and ensemble empirical mode decomposition over East Asia

Abstract:

Aerosol has played an important role in air quality for short term and climate change for long term. Especially, it is important to understand how aerosol optical depth (AOD) has changed to date for the prognosis of future atmospheric state and radiation budget which are related to human life. In this study, the trend of AOD at 550 nm from MODIS Aqua (MYD08) was estimated for 10 years from 2004 to 2014 using linear regression method and ensemble empirical mode decomposition method (EEMD). Search region was selected to East Asia [18.5°N-51.5°N, 85.5°E-150.5°E] which is considered to be of great interest in emission source. The result of linear regression shows remarkably increasing trend in North and East China including Sanjiang, Hailun, Beijing, Beijing forest and Jinozhou Bay, than rather downward trend in other neighboring regions. Actually, however, AOD has seasonality itself and its trend is also affected by external source consistently, so non-linear trend analysis was conducted to analyze the changing tendency of AOD trends. Consequently, secular trends of AOD defined by EEMD showed almost similar values over the entire region, but their shapes over time are quite different with those of linear regression. Here, AOD linear trend in Beijing has monotonically increased [0.03% yr^-1] since 2004, but its non-linear trend shows that initial increasing trend has alleviated and even turned into downward trend from about 2010. Lastly, the validation of MODIS AOD with AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) was conducted additionally which showed fairly good agreement with those of AERONET (R=0.901, RMSE=0.226, MAE=0.031, MBE=-0.001).