Spatial Gap-Filling of Hourly AOD Data from Himawari-8 Satellite Using DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and FMM (Fast Marching Method)

Since aerosol has a relatively short duration and significant spatial variation, satellite observations become more important for the spatially and temporally continuous quantification of aerosol. However, optical remote sensing has the disadvantage that it cannot detect AOD (Aerosol Optical Depth) for the regions covered by clouds or the regions with extremely high concentrations. Such missing values can increase the data uncertainty in the analyses of the Earth’s environment. This paper presents a spatial gap-filling framework using a univariate statistical method such as DCT-PLS (Discrete Cosine Transform-based Penalized Least Square Regression) and FMM (Fast Matching Method) inpainting. We conducted a feasibility test for the hourly AOD product from AHI (Advanced Himawari Imager) between January 1 and December 31, 2019, and compared the accuracy statistics of the two spatial gap-filling methods. When the null-pixel area is not very large (null-pixel ratio < 0.6), the validation statistics of DCT-PLS and FMM techniques showed high accuracy of CC=0.988 (MAE=0.020) and CC=0.980 (MAE=0.028), respectively. Together with the AI-based gap-filling method using extra explanatory variables, the DCT-PLS and FMM techniques can be tested for the low-resolution images from the AMI (Advanced Meteorological Imager) of GK2A (Geostationary Korea Multi-purpose Satellite 2A), GEMS (Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer) and GOCI2 (Geostationary Ocean Color Imager) of GK2B (Geostationary Korea Multi-purpose Satellite 2B) and the high-resolution images from the CAS500 (Compact Advanced Satellite) series soon.