International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Anthropogenic and natural aerosols are important atmospheric constituents that significantly contribute to the Earth’s radiation budget but remain uncertainties due to the poor understanding of their properties and their direct effects on scattering and absorption of solar radiation and their ability to stay in atmosphere for a very short time. The aerosol properties retrieved from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) measurements collected during the period 2004-2012 are used for the first time to identify the types of aerosols over Ghardaia city. Two parameters are used for aerosol analyses, the Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) and the Angstrom exponent (α). The obtained results show different types of aerosols, representing biomass-burning, urban, maritime and dust aerosols. The aerosol type discrimination shows a clear domination of urban aerosols compared to maritime, dust and biomass-burning aerosols. They represent respectively the fractions of 54 %, 32%, 13 % and 1%.

Index Terms—Aerosol optical thickness, aerosols, dust aerosols, urban aerosols, maritime aerosols, biomass-burning aerosols, angstrom exponent, angstrom coefficient.

Zaiani Mohamed and Djafer Djelloul are with Unité de Recherche Appliquée en Energies Renouvelables, URAER, Centre de Développement des Energies Renouvelables, CDER, 47133, Ghardaia, Algeria (e-mail: mohamed_zaiani@hotmail.fr, adjafer@gmail.com).
Chouireb Fatima is with Faculté de Technologie, Université de Laghouat, Algeria (fatimachouireb@yahoo.com).

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Cite: Zaiani Mohamed, Djafer Djelloul, and Chouireb Fatima, "Classification of Aerosol Types over Ghardaia, Algeria, Based on MODIS Data," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 7, no. 10, pp. 745-749, 2016.