• Atmosphere
• /
• v.25 no.3
• /
• pp.521-528
• /
• 2015

In this study star photometry was applied to retrieve aerosol optical thickness (AOT) at night. The star photometry system consisted of small refractor, optical filters, CCD camera, and driving mount and was located in Suwon. The calibration constants were retrieved from the astronomical Langley method but standard deviations of these were more than 10% of the mean values. After the calibration the nighttime AOT was retrieved and cloud-screened in clear six days from 25 Nov. 2014 to 17 Jan. 2015. To estimate the quality of the measurements the nighttime AOT was combined with daytime AOT retrieved from sky-radiometer that was located in Seoul and 17 km away from the star photometry system. In spite of the uncertainty of the calibration constants and the spatial difference of two observation systems, the temporal changes of the nighttime AOT coincided with the daytime. The nighttime ${\AA}ngstr{\ddot{o}}m$ exponent was about 20% lower and more variable than the daytime because of the uncertainty of the calibration constants. If the calibration process is more precise, the combination of star and sun or sky photometry system can monitor the air pollution day and night constantly.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.32 no.2
• /
• pp.73-86
• /
• 2016

In this study, an algorithm to estimate Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) over small cities during nighttime has been developed by using the radiance from artificial light sources in small cities measured from Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor's Day/Night Band (DNB) aboard the Suomi-National Polar Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. The algorithm is based on Beer's extinction law with the light sources from the artificial lights over small cities. AOT is retrieved for cloud-free pixels over individual cities, and cloud-screening was conducted by using the measurements from M-bands of VIIRS at infrared wavelengths. The retrieved nighttime AOT is compared with the aerosol products from MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra and Aqua satellites. As a result, the correlation coefficients over individual cities range from around 0.6 and 0.7 between the retrieved nighttime AOT and MODIS AOT with Root-Mean-Squared Difference (RMSD) ranged from 0.14 to 0.18. In addition, sensitivity tests were conducted for the factors affecting the nighttime AOT to estimate the range of uncertainty in the nighttime AOT retrievals. The results of this study indicate that it is promising to infer AOT using the DNB measaurements over small cities in Korea at night. After further development and refinement in the future, the developed retrieval algorithm is expected to produce nighttime aerosol information which is not operationally available over Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.29 no.5
• /
• pp.555-568
• /
• 2013

Atmospheric optical thickness during nighttime was estimated in this study using analysis on the images of the moon taken from commercial digital camera. Basically the Langely Regression method was applied to the observations of the moon for the cloudless and optically stable sky conditions. The spectral response functions for the red(R), green(G), and blue(B) channels were employed to derive effective wavelength centers of each channel for the observations of the moon, and the correspondent Rayleigh optical thickness were also calculated. Aerosol optical thickness (AOT) was calculated by subtracting Rayleigh optical thickness from the atmospheric optical thickness derived from the Langley regression method. As there are only handful of nighttime AOT observations, the AOT from the moon observations was compared with the AOT from sun-photometers and the MODIS satellite sensor, which was taken several hours before the moon observations of this study. As a result, the values of AOT from moon observations agree with those from sun-photometers and MODIS within 0.1 for the R, G, B channels of the digital camera. On the other hand, ${\AA}$ngstr$\ddot{o}$m Exponent seems to be subject to larger errors due to its sensitiveness to the spectral errors of AOT. Nevertheless, the results of this study indicate that the method reported in this study is promising as it can provide nighttime AOT relatively easily with a low cost instrument like digital camera. More observations and analyses are warranted to attain improved nighttime AOT observations in the future.