High Resolution Aerosol Retrieval Over Urban Surfaces Using Landsat 8 Oli

The popular enhanced deep blue (DB) algorithm, though performs well in aerosol retrieval over the entire land surfaces, limited by the low temporal resolution and insufficient satellite-derived products of most high resolution satellite sensors, is hardly to be applied to urban areas using high spatial resolution satellite imageries. In this paper, we developed a simplified deep blue algorithm to retrieve 30m spatial resolution aerosol optical thickness (AOT) over urban surfaces using Landsat 8 OLI measurements. With a few atmospheric correction surface reflectance-apparent reflectance pairs, robust relationships between visible (0.65μm and 0.48μm) and 2.2μm reflectance can be constructed by this algorithm. Difficulties described above are overcame, and high consistency with ground-based AERONET measurements are achieved over Beijing, with correlation coefficient (R2) ~0.951, root mean square error (RMSE) ~0.005, mean absolute error (MAE) ~0.05 and 82.61% retrievals fall within the expected error (EE) envelop. This study demonstrates that the simplified deep blue algorithm has advantages in retrieval high spatial resolution AOTs over urban areas.