AERUS-GEO: A newly available satellite-derived aerosol optical depth product over Europe and Africa
Carrer, Dominique ; Ceamanos, Xavier ; Six, B. ; Roujean, Jean-Louis
This article presents a new aerosol optical depth (AOD) product delivered in near real time by the ICARE Data and Services Center to the scientific community. The AERUS-GEO (Aerosol and surface albEdo Retrieval Using a directional Splitting method-application to GEOstationary data) product is derived from observations from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) geostationary satellite covering Europe, Africa, and part of Asia and South America. The retrieval method exploits the directional information contained in the series of 96 MSG observations per day of the Earth's disk to derive a daily averaged AOD. The performances of this product are similar to those of other widely used satellite-derived AOD. This article illustrates the advantages of the spatial (3 km at best) and temporal (daily) resolution of the AERUS-GEO product to monitor particular aerosol activity (e.g., volcanic eruptions) or to study given phenomena (e.g., the impact of topography on aerosol loading).
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