Preliminary Evaluation of Himawari-8 Hourly Aerosol Products Over China

In this study, the ground measured Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) at 500nm at ten sites of the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) in China were collected to evaluate the AOD retrieved from the observations by the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard the Himawari-8 satellite. The results show the AHI aerosol products have great uniformity with ground measurements with correlated coefficient (R) of the two datasets is 0.808, and the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) and Relative Mean Bias (RMB) values are 0.152, 0.045 and 1.107 respectively. From a spatial perspective, the AOD retrievals are overestimated at 50% of the sites selected in this study, especially in northwest and north China. In terms of time, summer has the best performance (correlation coefficient) followed by autumn winter, and spring. March, October and November has the relatively poor performance in a 12-month period, while the best performance appeared in June.