Performance Evaluation of Satellite Observation of Sand/Dust Weather and Its Application in Assessing the Accuracy of Numerical Models

Air quality monitoring and forecasting has been a challenging problem for years. In addition to traditional ground-based observational stations, in recent years there have been more geostationary and polar orbiting satellite observations on air quality. However, evaluation of performance of these observations is lacking, especially for the region of southern China, which is rarely affected by severe sand/dust weather. In the spring of 2025, two events of sand/dust weather, one case of sand/dust spreading to southern China in April and another case of sand/dust confining to northern China in May, provide a good opportunity for detailed case study and examination of the performance of the tools. The surface particulate matter (PM) concentration retrieved from a geostationary satellite, Geostationary Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite—2B (GEO-KOMPSAT-2B, or GK2B), is studied by checking consistency with the analysis of two numerical models: the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service model of the European Centre of Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF-CAMS) and Chinese Unified Atmospheric Chemistry Environment model of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA-CUACE). The former shows comparable PM concentration with satellite observations, while overestimation is found with the latter. It is also found that there may be latitude dependence of the quality of the satellite-based data. To further validate the satellite observation data, it is directly compared with the ground-based station measurements in Hong Kong for the event in mid-April 2025, the performance of satellite data points near Hong Kong is generally satisfactory. For polar orbiting satellite, there is information about the aerosol classification in addition to aerosol optical depth, and the classification result is found to be reasonable by comparison with ground-based observation, though some refinements appear to be necessary. The geostationary satellite images provide high spatial coverage and frequently updated air quality data, which are confirmed to be useful in monitoring the southward spread of sand/dust weather to southern China which is a very rare event. The monitoring can be both qualitative and quantitative. The performance of various monitoring and forecasting tools is examined in details based on the cases. It also forms a reference for the use in operation, and opens up a new era for air quality study for southern China.