Aerosol Optical Depth Retrieval from Recalibrated AVHRR Data for China Mainland in 1998

The retrieval of the distribution of aerosol properties and determination of trends in their temporal variation can only be achieved by the use of long-term satellite measurements. The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) carried on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the EUMETSAT Meteorological Operational Satellite (Metop) polar orbiting satellites offers more than 35 years of satellite data since 1978 which makes it worthwhile to explore their use for the analysis of aerosols on a daily basis. So in this paper we applied the algorithm for the land aerosol and bidirectional reflectance inversion by times series technique (LABITS) to data from AVHRR Channel 1 on the NOAA-12 and NOAA-14 satellites using a model for the earth-atmosphere system which couples an atmospheric radiative transfer model with the Ross - Thick - Li-sparse bidirectional reflectance factor (BRF) model. Preliminary results show that LABITS provides good results over China for different surface type. Comparing our results with the with SeaWiFS (Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor) aerosol product AOD products shows good agreement. The algorithm has the potential to retrieve global AOD over land for long time series of NOAA AVHRR data going back to the 1980s, which are urgently needed for studies on aerosol climatology and global climate change.