Fusion of Aerosol Optical Depth from the GOCI and the AHI Observations

In this study, fused Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) data were produced using AOD products from the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) onboard Communication, Oceanography and Meteorology Satellite (COMS) satellite and the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard Himawari-8. Since the spatial resolution and the coordinate system between the satellite sensors are different, a preprocessing was first preceded. After that, using the level 1.5 AOD dataset of AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET), which is ground-based observation, correlations and trends between each satellite AOD and AERONET AOD were utilized to produce more accurate satellite AOD data than the original satellite AODs. The fused AOD were found to be more accurate than the original satellite AODs. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and mean bias of the fused AODs were calculated to be 0.13 and 0.05, respectively. We also compared errors of the fused AODs against those of the original GOCI AOD (RMSE: 0.15, mean bias: 0.11) and the original AHI AOD (RMSE: 0.15, mean bias: 0.05). It was confirmed that the fused AODs have better spatial coverage than the original AODs in areas where there are no observations due to the presence of cloud from a single satellite.