Grid Enabled Simultaneous Retrieval of Aerosol and Ground Surface Reflectance from Integration of AERONET and Satellite Data

In this paper, a method using multi-resource remotely sensed data and ground base data for quantitative determination of aerosol optical properties was demonstrated. The model exploits the synergy of TERRA and AQUA MODerate resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) data, to simultaneously retrieve both Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) and surface reflectance. The ground station data routinely coming from AERosol Robotic NETwork (AERONET) of ground-based sun- and sky-scanning radiometers were assimilated as variables describing model initial states. To meet the increased computational needs caused by the complex and computational intensity, the algorithm was migrated to run as parallel processing on a Grid platform. Experimental results were presented with a realistic application, using data collected by MODIS over China mainland. The results show that Grid-enabled model allowed on-demand large volume of ground-based data assimilation with parameters, and achieved improvement both in retrieval accuracy and computing performance.