Correlation between AERONET AOT and VIIRS EDR AOT: A new EDR cell

Abstract:

Every year, a huge mass of desert dusts lifted from Saharan and sub Saharan regions is injected over the Atlantic Ocean and bring to the Caribbean and the American continent. Guadeloupe a West Indies island, is affected by the presence of dusts particles which impact the air quality and acts on human health. The effect produced by the particles in the atmosphere can be observed by satellite. VIIRS is one the latest tools provided by NASA, to help scientific community to have a better understanding of aerosol behavior. In this job we try to found a link between ground measurement AOT and VIIRS data.

In Guadeloupe, AOT measurements have been performed with sun photometer of AERONET network. We calculated AOT at 500 nm mean daily sun photometer data in order to compare them with AOT EDR 550 data computed by NOAA Aerosol calibration and validation team. Three AOT EDR cells, located over the ocean and close to the East coast of the island of have been chosen to evaluate the correlation between ground and satellite data. We obtained using data performed from May to December 2012, correlation coefficient range between 0.8 and 0.87.

We observed numerous AOT EDR 550 have been computed with a number of IP pixel, nAOT very low. We proposed to used only cases with nAOT equal or higher than 10. The correlation coefficients improved and reached 0.9. However, those good results have been obtained with a day number reduced by almost 50 per cent.

In order to keep a good correlation and a higher number of day we rebuilt a cell by merging two cells. We obtained a new cell with an AOT EDR value equal to the mean AOT EDR of the two parents’ value and a nAOT the sum of the previous nAOTs. The results with the new nAOT equal of higher than 10 is, r =0.91 and we keep 75 per cent of the cases.