THREE-DIMENSIONAL AEROSOL STRUCTURE CONSTRUCTION WITH REGIONAL SPECTRAL RADIATION MATCHING

Aerosol vertical structure (AVS) plays an important role in the Earth's climate system. The spectral radiance matching (SRM) method can effectively reconstruct the aerosol three-dimensional structure, but it is affected by the donor-recipient matching accuracy. To overcome the problem, in this paper, the SRM algorithm is improved by using regional spectral radiation matching instead of single-pixel spectral matching. First, the cost function is constructed by the multispectral radiometric difference between the off-nadir recipient pixel neighborhood and the potential donor neighborhood within the MODIS scan. The best donor-recipient match is selected by minimizing the cost function. Then, the corresponding donor pixel aerosol profile information from CALIPSO observations is assigned to the recipient pixel, which fills the gaps between CALIPSO track and achieves a true AVS global estimate. Finally, the accuracy of the algorithm was verified by using AD-NET station data. The experimental results show that the reconstruction results of the region-based method are consistent with the ground-based lidar measurements and superior to the pixel-based SRM method.