First Atmospheric Aerosol Monitoring Results from Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) over Asia

Abstract:

This study shows the first atmospheric aerosol monitoring results from Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) after the launch of GK-2B satellites. GEMS measures hourly hyperspectral radiances with the spectral resolution of 0.6 nm in UV and visible range (300 – 500 nm) and the spatial resolution of 3.5 x 8 km² over Asia during daytime to measure air quality (Kim et al., 2020). Taking advantage of the sensitivity of aerosol absorption and aerosol height information in UV-Vis wavelengths, GEMS aerosol algorithm retrieves aerosol optical properties such as aerosol optical depth (AOD), UV aerosol index (UVAI), single scattering albedo (SSA), and aerosol loading height (ALH) (Kim et al., 2018; Go et al., 2020). We will provide GEMS aerosol retrieval results to discuss high aerosol loading cases over East Asia and analysis results as a case study. Our preliminary results show that the GEMS aerosol products have advantages to capture the diurnal variation with high spatio-temporal resolution. Further, the first validation of GEMS aerosol products is presented as compared to ground-based AERONET and other aerosol products obtained from the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard Himawari-8. Our results show qualitatively good agreement and fine-scale features in high spatio-temporal resolution.