Evaluation of MERIS Aerosol Products for National and Regional Air Quality in Austria

RESUME The Umweltbundesamt (Austrian Federal Environment Agency, FEA) is currently evaluating the potential of satellite data for assessing national and regional air quality. Within the framework of the GSE project PROMOTE, Service Level Agreements (SLA) were signed between the Umweltbundesamt and various data providers. In this paper, the ESA standard MERIS aerosol product, provided by ACRI-ST in near-real time, is evaluated. Data are also provided temporally aggregated for air quality reporting. In this paper, we present a first evaluation of ENVISAT/MERIS aerosol products during the period March to August 2005 and comparisons to data from the in-situ ground based monitoring network.