Retrieval of Atmospheric Horizontal Visibility by Statistical Regression from NOAA/AVHRR Satellite Data

Based on the atmospheric horizontal visibility data from forty-seven observational stations along the eastern coast of China near the Taiwan Strait and simultaneous NOAA/AVHRR multichannel satellite data during January 2001 to December 2002, the spectral characters associated with visibility were investigated. Successful retrieval of visibility from multichannel NOAA/AVHRR data was performed using the principal component regression (PCR) method. A sample of retrieved visibility distribution was discussed with a sea fog process. The correlation coefficient between the observed and retrieved visibility was about 0.82, which is far higher than the 99.9% confidence level by statistical test. The rate of successful retrieval is 94.98% of the 458 cases during 2001–2002. The error distribution showed that high visibilities were usually under-estimated and low visibilities were over-estimated and the relative error between the observed and retrieved visibilities was about 21.4%.