Study on the possibility of the aerosol and/or Yellow dust detection in the atmosphere by Ocean Scanning Multispectral Imager(OSMI)

To examine the detectability of the aerosol and/or Yellow dust from China crossing over the Yellow sea, three works carried out as follows , Firstly, a comparison was made of the visible(VIS), water vapor(WV), and Infrared(IR) images of the GMS-5 and NOAA/AVHRR on the cases of yellow sand event over Korea. Secondly, the spectral radiance and reflectance(%) was observed during the yellow sand phenomena on April, 1998 in Seoul using the GER-2600 spectroradiometer, which observed the reflected radiance from 350 to 2500 nm in the atmosphere. We selected the optimum wavelength for detecting of the yellow sand from this observation, considering the effects of atmospheric absorption. Finally, the atmospheric radiance emerging from the LOWTRAN-7 radiative transfer model was simulated with and without yellow sand, where we used the estimated aerosol column optical depth ($\tau$ 673 nm) in the Meteorological Research Institute and the d'Almeida's statistical atmospheric aerosol radiative characteristics. The image analysis showed that it was very difficult to detect the yellow sand region only by the image processing because the albedo characteristics of the sand vary irregularly according to the density, size, components and depth of the yellow sand clouds. We found that the 670-680 nm band was useful to simulate aerosol characteristics considering the absorption band from the radiance observation. We are now processing the simulation of atmospheric radiance distribution in the range of 400-900 nm. The purpose of this study is to present the preliminary results of the aerosol and/or Yellow dust detectability using the Ocean Scanning Multispectral Imager(OSMI), which will be mounted on KOMPSAT-1 as the ocean color monitoring sensor with the range of 400-900 nm wavelength.