Validation Analysis of Himawari-8 Aerosol Optical Depth Products

Himawari-8 is a new generation of geostationary meteorological satellites launched by the Japan Meteorological Administration. The advanced Himawari imager (AHI) sensor carried by Himawari-8 can achieve a high temporal resolution observation for 10 min/time. Level-2 aerosol optical depth (AOD) dataset from Himawari-8 satellite was compared with AERONET (AErosol RObotic NETwork) AOD at 70 sites from September 2015 to December 2017. The results show that the precision of AOD products retrieved by Himawari-8 satellite has a large spatial difference. Among them, 48 sites feature a good correlation between Himawari-8 AOD and AERONET AOD (R>0.5). The Himawari-8 AOD clearly underestimates the ground-based AOD at 22 sites. At some sites, including American_Samoa, Bandung, Birdsville, Bukit_Kototabang, Canberra, Fowlers_Gap, Jabiru, and QOMS_CAS, ground-based AODs are small and Himawari-8 satellite-retrieved AOD is large. Analysis of the absolute error (the difference between Himawari-8 AOD and AERONET AOD) shows that a good correlation exists between absolute error and AERONET AOD when the Himawari-8 AOD underestimates ground-based observations. In areas where ground-based observations are small and satellite inversion data are large, a good linear relationship exists between absolute error and Himawari-8 AOD. This provides useful basic information for the improvement and perfection of the Himawari-8 AOD inversion algorithm.