Comparison of aerosol optical depth between CALIOP and MODIS‐Aqua for CALIOP aerosol subtypes over the ocean

Abstract

AbstractThe Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) aerosol optical depth (AOD) has been compared with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)‐Aqua AOD using Level 2 products of both instruments. Such comparisons have been performed for five different aerosol subtypes classified by CALIOP algorithm, namely clean marine, dust, polluted dust, polluted continental, and biomass burning, over the ocean from June 2006 to December 2010. MODIS AOD at 550 nm (0.111 ± 0.079) for the collocated data pairs is about 63% higher than CALIOP AOD at 532 nm (0.068 ± 0.073). For clean marine, MODIS AOD (0.110 ± 0.064) is almost twice the CALIOP AOD (0.056 ± 0.038), and the difference between the AOD values has a strong latitude dependence likely related to the surface wind speed over the ocean. The difference in AOD for dust (13%) is observed to be the lowest among the five aerosol types under consideration, but it shows a slight regional variation. The discrepancy of AOD for dust also shows strong dependency on the layer mean of the particulate depolarization ratio. CALIOP AOD is higher than MODIS AOD for both polluted dust and polluted continental by 15% and 29%, respectively, for most of the ocean. One of the possible reasons for the difference is the misclassification of clean marine (or marine + dust) as polluted dust and polluted continental in the CALIOP algorithm. For biomass burning, uncertainty in the layer base altitude is thought to be one of the main reasons for the lower value of CALIOP AOD.