Can satellite-derived aerosol optical depth quantify the surface aerosol radiative forcing?

• We assess four satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD) products.
• AOD is derived from low Earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary (GEO) satellite images.
• Products show similar accuracy but GEO-based provide a higher number of retrievals.
• Satellite-derived AOD is used to estimate surface aerosol radiative forcing (SARF).
• While GEO-derived AOD provides better SARF values, precision is still insufficient.

Aerosols play an important role in the climate of the Earth through aerosol radiative forcing (ARF). Nowadays, aerosol particles are detected, quantified and monitored by remote sensing techniques using low Earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary (GEO) satellites. In the present article, the use of satellite-derived AOD (aerosol optical depth) products is investigated in order to quantify on a daily basis the ARF at the surface level (SARF). By daily basis we mean that an average SARF value is computed every day based upon the available AOD satellite measurements for each station. In the first part of the study, the performance of four state-of-art different AOD products (MODIS-DT, MODIS-DB, MISR, and SEVIRI) is assessed through comparison against ground-based AOD measurements from 24 AERONET stations located in Europe and Africa during a 6-month period. While all AOD products are found to be comparable in terms of measured value (RMSE of 0.1 for low and average AOD values), a higher number of AOD estimates is made available by GEO satellites due to their enhanced frequency of scan. Experiments show a general lower agreement of AOD estimates over the African sites (RMSE of 0.2), which show the highest aerosol concentrations along with the occurrence of dust aerosols, coarse particles, and bright surfaces. In the second part of this study, the lessons learned about the confidence in aerosol burden derived from satellites are used to estimate SARF under clear sky conditions. While the use of AOD products issued from GEO observations like SEVIRI brings improvement in the SARF estimates with regard to LEO-based AOD products, the resulting absolute bias (13 W/m2 in average when AERONET AOD is used as reference) is judged to be still high in comparison with the average values of SARF found in this study (from − 25 W/m2 to − 43 W/m2) and also in the literature (from − 10 W/m2 to − 47 W/m2).