Atmospheric aerosol load as derived from space

The paper is devoted to the introduction of a new technique to derive the aerosol mass load and particle number concentration from spaceborne observations. It is based on the simultaneous determination of the spectral aerosol optical thickness (AOT) τ and the spectral effective Lambertian ground reflectance A for a given scene using the aerosol retrieval algorithm developed by us. The aerosol mass is proportional to the measured AOT with the coefficient of proportionality dependent on the effective radius aef of aerosol particles. The value of aef can be estimated from the slope of the function τ(λ), where λ is the wavelength. The developed technique is applied to SeaWiFs imagery data over Moscow.