Comparison of aerosol optical depth (AOD) determined from UVMRP and AERONET

Abstract

Aerosol optical depth (AOD) is critically important for a better understanding of how Earth’s climate is radiatively forced. To compensate for the conventional satellite observations, several types of ground-based radiometers are operated by AOD measurement programs. This study compares the Bratts Lake climate station’s long-term AOD measurements from 1999 to 2012 which are derived from two ground-based programs with high accuracy: the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) UV-B Monitoring and Research Program (UVMRP) and the AERONET (AErosol RObotic NETwork) program. The comparison shows that, in the 14-year period, the AOD values have an excellent agreement at six wavelengths (368, 415, 500, 610, 665, and 860 nm) with varying slopes (ranging from 0.95763 to 1.04089), intercepts (ranging from 0.0219 to 0.03945), correlation coefficients (R) (ranging from 0.82005 to 0.96155), and root mean square errors (RMSE) (ranging from 0.02639 to 0.03663). The correlations of both monthly and hourly averaged AOD measurements are highly consistent for each band. Specifically, the shorter (with larger AOD values) the wavelength is, the better the correlation is. Also, the results show that the peaks of relative errors generally occur in summer each year, and at noon each day. Our analyses suggest that AOD products derived from UVMRP are accurate and can serve as an alternative ground-based validation source for satellite AOD measurements.