Modeling and spatial characterization of aerosols at Middle East AERONET stations

In this paper, we employed an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to simulate aerosol optical depth time series from the ground-based AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) from 2012 to 2021. To test the validity and applicability of the developed ARIMA model, we correlated the ARIMA predicted for 2021 with AERONET network data and obtained a correlation coefficient of ~ 0.9. Additionally, we compared the results with the space-based Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data for the Middle East and obtained a considerable correlation coefficient of ~ 0.5. We employ the threshold of the Angstrom exponent (AE) as a measure of the spectral dependence of aerosol optical depth (AOD), which ranges between 0 and 1, to characterize aerosol types. The results show weighted averages of AOD ≥ 0.2 and AE ≥ 1.0 for fine-mode aerosol spray in IASBS (36.705 N, 48.507 E), AOD > 0.2 and AE < 1.0 for dust aerosols in Nes_Ziona (31.922 N, 34.789 E), AOD > 0.4, 0.5 < AE < 1.0 for dust and maritime aerosol for Masdar _Institute station (24.442 N, 54.617 E) and AE < 1, AOD ≤ 0.5 for dust and maritime aerosol in Hada_El-Sham (21.802 N, 39.729E).