Analysis on the correlation of atmospheric path radiation and air pollution index

Conventional ground-based air pollution observations are difficult to indicate the spatial distribution of pollutant and its changes. To overcome the difficulty, this paper proposes a method which is used to monitor the distribution of urban air pollution by using remote sensing technology. The method uses surface reflectance image to extract the weak atmospheric information from MODIS data, and then generate the atmospheric path radiation (APR) image. The APR image and air pollution data obtained from ground stations are applied to monitor the change of air condition in Shanghai and Nanjing areas. The study indicates that APR values are sensitive to air pollution index (API); and remote sensing data maybe have great potential in monitoring of air pollution at regional- or global-scale.