NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) is scheduled to be in orbit in 2019 onboard the GEO-KOMPSAT 2B satellite and will continuously monitor air quality over Asia. The GEMS will make measurements in the UV spectrum (300–500 nm) with 0.6 nm resolution. In this study, an algorithm is developed to retrieve aerosol optical properties from UV-visible measurements for the future satellite instrument and is tested using 3 years of existing OMI L1B data. This algorithm provides aerosol optical depth (AOD), single scattering albedo (SSA) and aerosol layer height (ALH) using an optimized estimation method. The retrieved AOD shows good correlation with Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) AOD with correlation coefficients of 0.83, 0.73 and 0.80 for heavy-absorbing fine (HAF) particles, dust and non-absorbing (NA) particles, respectively. However, regression tests indicate underestimation and overestimation of HAF and NA AOD, respectively. In comparison with AOD from the OMI/Aura Near-UV Aerosol Optical Depth and Single Scattering Albedo 1-orbit L2 Swath 13 km × 24 km V003 (OMAERUV) algorithm, the retrieved AOD has a correlation coefficient of 0.86 and linear regression equation, AODGEMS = 1.18AODOMAERUV + 0.09. An uncertainty test based on a reference method, which estimates retrieval error by applying the algorithm to simulated radiance data, revealed that assumptions in the spectral dependency of aerosol absorptivity in the UV cause significant errors in aerosol property retrieval, particularly the SSA retrieval. Consequently, retrieved SSAs did not show good correlation with AERONET values. The ALH results were qualitatively compared with the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) products and were found to be well correlated for highly absorbing aerosols. The difference between the attenuated-backscatter-weighted height from CALIOP and retrieved ALH were mostly closed to zero when the retrieved AOD is higher than 0.8 and SSA is lower than 0.93. Although retrieval accuracy was not significantly improved, the simultaneous consistent retrieval of AOD, SSA and ALH alone demonstrates the value of this stand-alone algorithm, given their nature for error using other methods. The use of these properties as input parameters for the air mass factor calculation is expected to improve the retrieval of other trace gases over Asia.