Chapter 17 - Air Quality Applications of ABI Aerosol Products from the GOES-R Series

Abstract

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its international partners have begun to deploy a new generation of sensors into geostationary orbit. NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)-R and GOES-S (now called GOES-16 and GOES-17) carry Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instruments for imaging Earth’s weather, oceans, and atmosphere. NOAA began the production of ABI aerosol products, which include aerosol optical depth (AOD), aerosol detection (dust/smoke mask) and imagery [GeoColor and dust red-green-blue (RGB)] products. The AOD algorithm is based on a dark target approach and the aerosol detection is based on spectral differencing techniques. From analysis of the prelaunch algorithm testing, the expected accuracy for AOD is dependent on aerosol amounts and whether the surface is land (expected accuracies of 0.06, 0.04, 0.12 for low, medium, high AODs, respectively) or water (expected accuracies of 0.02 and 0.1 for low and medium AODs, respectively), where for example, accuracy of 0.06 implies retrieved AOD is within ±0.06 of truth. For aerosol detection, the expected accuracy is 80% except for smoke over the ocean where it is 70%. NOAA plans to expand the coverage to bright surfaces based on the Aerosol Enterprise Processing System (EPS) algorithm that was developed and operationally implemented for the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) and NOAA-20 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). This chapter reviews the history of geostationary satellite aerosol retrievals, highlights the new GOES-16 ABI aerosol algorithms and products, and discusses how the long-range transport of smoke from fire events in Canada on August 16, 2018, for example, affected the air quality in the Mid-Atlantic states in the US.