Retrieving Aerosol Optical Depth over Turbid Coastal Water

We present an approach to retrieve Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) over turbid coastal water where operational MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Dark Target (DT) aerosol retrieval algorithm is not applied due to high water leaving radiance. Filling the coastal water AOD gap is significant because 60% of human population lives in the coastal zone. In this study, the Top of Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance at 2.1 μm observed from MODIS is used to retrieve AOD over turbid coastal water through look up table method as water leaving radiance is negligible at the band. During the retrieval process, aerosol model is substituted by the counterpart of the closest pixel retrieved through MODIS ocean DT algorithm. AOD retrievals over turbid coastal water are validated against observations from six AERONET sites at coastal region in one month. The monthly mean AERONET 440-870 nm Ångström exponent ranges from 0.597 to 1.842 for the six sites, thus they can represent from coarse-mode dominated to fine-mode dominated scenes. AOD retrievals in this study are more in agreement with AERONET observations than operational MODIS AOD (over land or clean coastal water) in terms of bias, and root-mean-square error.