Intercomparison and combination of satellite retrieved aerosol optical depth over land

Atmospheric aerosols play an important role in climate change research. It was found that different algorithms and instruments produce somewhat different results for aerosol optical depth (AOD) even if the same location at the same time is observed. Therefore, it is critical to integrate data from multiple platforms and techniques to derive a consistent AOD product. This paper introduced an approach to combine MODIS and MISR AOD data. One-month AOD data derived over Asian land with two different retrieval algorithms applied to MODIS and one retrieval algorithm applied to MISR are compared. Results show that the correlation coefficient between combined AOD product and AOD measured by CE318 is 0.70, and the root mean square error (RMSE) is 0.023. Moreover, it provided more details about the aerosols over land than either of the individual satellite measurements by mutually compensating for each other.