The Dark Target aerosol algorithm applied to Himawari-8 Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) looking at the KORUS-AQ and CAMP2EX field campaigns

The Dark Target (DT) aerosol algorithm was originally applied to the MODIS sensors aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites soon after those satellites launched and has been modified and optimized over the past 20 years to produce a well-characterized and understood aerosol product. With the launch of Himawari-8, GOES-16 and GOES-17 over the past five years, the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) on Himawari and the Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABIs) on the GOES satellites became the first geostationary instruments to provide sufficient wavelength bands with a moderate spatial resolution to be used as input for a modified DT aerosol algorithm. The modifications necessary to the DT algorithm to be able to process these data include adjusting for different wavelengths, adapting for the missing 0.55 μm, 1.24 μm and 1.38 μm channels on the various sensors, taking into account differences in spatial resolution and extreme solar and viewing geometries. These modifications were made and the DT algorithm has been applied successfully to AHI and ABIs observations, retrieving aerosol optical depth over land and ocean, and aerosol size parameter over ocean. The new retrievals have compared favorably with AERONET, as well as with collocated MODIS DT retrievals. The new aerosol retrieval capability of AHI and ABI, along with MODIS and VIIRS, allow for new insight into the diurnal signatures of aerosols over local, regional and global scales. In particular we will examine the diurnal aerosol signature derived from AHI during the KORUS-AQ (2016) and CAMP2EX (2019) field campaigns.