Consistency of the aerosol type classification from satellite remote sensing during the Atmospheric Brown Cloud-East Asia Regional Experiment campaign

Abstract

The Atmospheric Brown Cloud-East Asia Regional Experiment (ABC-EAREX) was conducted under the UNEP/ABC-Asia project to intercompare the aerosol and gas measurements in springtime from various instruments from late February to April 2005 at the Gosan Supersite on Jeju Island, Korea. Satellite instruments such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) provide a large-scale regional view of the aerosol during the ABC-EAREX period. This study shows the temporal and spatial distribution of four major aerosol types (dust, carbonaceous, sea salt and sulfate) retrieved by MODIS-OMI Algorithm and Four-Channel Algorithm utilizing data from MODIS and OMI over east Asia during the ABC-EAREX campaign. Results from two different retrieval show that a complexity of aerosol types and sources exist over east Asia: Some aerosols are emitted while others are transported. Nevertheless, the results show reasonable consistency in the distribution according to aerosol type. The agreement of aerosol type classification for each aerosol type ranges from 32% to 81% depending on the type. These results were compared with the results from a three-dimensional aerosol transport radiation model, SPRINTARS. Dust type aerosol is usually found to be mixed with carbonaceous type aerosol. It implies that the dust type aerosol is loaded and transported with polluted air mass. The evidence that polluted air masses in the continent can be transported long distance is also captured; that is, sea salt type mixed with the sulfate aerosol is detected over a remote ocean.