Developing Aerosol Height Product from MODIS and Synergy of MODIS and CALIPSO Measurements for Global Application

Aerosol vertical distribution is critical in many perspectives of atmospheric research. Lidar instrumentation is currently considered as the only means in providing the ground truths of aerosol vertical profiles. The MODIS normalized aerosol height index (NAHI) can be used routinely to estimate aerosol layer height with the same coverage of MODIS AOD, creating a virtual 3-D view of daily aerosol fields. The synergy of the wide-coverage MODIS aerosol height index and high-precision CALIPSO aerosol vertical profile enables us to constrain NAHI and also translate the estimated errors to the entire MODIS swath.