Evaluation of MERRA-2 and MODIS C6.1 aerosol products over Indonesia

Climatology Department, Agency for Meteorology Climatology and Geophysics of Republic of In-donesia (BMKG), Jl. Angkasa I, No. 2, Kemayoran, Jakarta 10720, Indonesia

^* Corresponding author: aulia.nisaul@bmkg.go.id

Abstract

Atmospheric aerosols play an essential role in atmospheric chemistry and climate. Amidst the issue of climate change, analysis of at-mospheric aerosols based on satellite and reanalysis is needed to estimate radiative forcing by aerosols, completing the spatial gap obtained from ground-based observation data. This research aims to evaluate the satellite and reanalysis aerosol products including Modern-Era Retrospective analy-sis for Research and Applications Version 2 (MERRA-2) and Moderate Res-olution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Collection 6.1 (C6.1) over In-donesia in the recent two decades, 2001 - 2020. The long-term performance of MERRA-2 and MODIS C6.1 is evaluated using the Aerosol Robotic Net-work (AERONET)-derived AOD. In general, the results show that the cor-relation of the two data models is good. The average correlation between AOD data obtained from AERONET to MERRA-2 and MODIS C6.1 was 0.8 and 0.5 at all locations, respectively. Meanwhile, the average RMSE val-ues for MERRA-2 and MODIS C6.1 were 0.24 and 0.26 at all locations, respectively. This study successfully assessed the performance of MERRA-2 and MODIS C6.1 in Indonesia as an initial study. This initial study verifies that MERRA-2 and MODIS C6.1 can be used to complement surface data in Indonesia.