Monitoring of urban air pollution from MODIS and AERONET Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) data

Air pollution, caused by fuel industries and urban traffic and its environmental impact, are of considerable interest to studies in air quality. In this paper, the monitoring of the air pollution over urban areas in Italy through Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) data retrieved from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) measurements is presented. The high spatio-temporal frequency of MODIS AOT products (twice per day at 470nm, 1km full resolution) demonstrates that this satellite can be potentially used to routinely monitor the air pollution over land, especially urban area, which is the main source of aerosol particles. In this work AOT data derived by MODIS from November 2010 to February 2011 (winter period) and from May 2011 to August 2011 (summer period) were compared with AOT measurements from 6 different Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) stations over Italy (Bari, Lecce, Roma, Ispra, Potenza, Etna). The statistical analysis shows a good agreement between the ground based AOT measurements and the values retrieved using space based sensors, as shown in Figure 1. For all the stations the mean error is negligible, with a correlation ranging from 0.725 (in the worst case) to 0.96 (see Table 1). Moreover, LANDSAT-panchromatic images were used to discriminate urban and rural areas, based on the typical finger-like projections of urban land uses. The results of this study will be presented and commented.