The active-passive remote sensing for aerosol optical depth retrieval

In this paper, a hybrid retrieval method of aerosol optical depth based on the combination of active and passive optical remote sensing is proposed. Two methods to retrieve the atmospheric optical depth are introduced: the so-called dark pixel method is used for retrieving the aerosol optical depth from MODIS; the other one is used by CALIPSO lidar data. After analyzing the two methods, the combined MODIS and CALIPSO method is applied for the aerosol optical depth, the primary experimental results show that these data are in agreement with each other in time-space evolvement trend.