How Important Is Satellite-Retrieved Aerosol Optical Depth in Deriving Surface PM2.5 Using Machine Learning?

Zhongyan Tian, Jing Wei, Zhanqing Li

PM2.5 refers to the total mass concentration of tiny particulates in the atmosphere near the surface, obtained by means of in situ observations and satellite remote sensing. Given the highly limited number of ground observation stations of inhomogeneous distribution and an ill-posed remote sensing approach, increasing efforts have been devoted to the application of machine-learning (ML) models to both ground and satellite data. A key satellite-derived parameter, aerosol optical thickness (AOD), has been most commonly used as a proxy of PM2.5, although their correlation is fraught with large uncertainties. A critical question that has been overlooked concerns how much AOD helps to improve the retrieval of PM2.5 relative to its uncertainty incurred concurrently. The question is addressed here by taking advantage of high-density PM2.5 stations in eastern China to evaluate the contributions of AOD, determined as the difference in the accuracy of PM2.5 retrievals with and without AOD for varying densities of PM2.5 stations, using four popular ML models (i.e., Random Forest, Extra-trees, XGBoost, and LightGBM). Our results reveal that as the density of monitoring stations decreases, both the feature importance and permutation importance of satellite AOD demonstrate a consistent upward trend (p < 0.05). Furthermore, the ML models without AOD exhibit faster declines in overall accuracy and predictive ability compared with the models with AOD assessed using the sample-based and station-based (spatial) independent cross-validation approaches. Overall, a 10% reduction in the number of stations results in an increase of 0.7–1.2% and 0.6–1.2% in uncertainty in estimated and predicted accuracies, respectively. These findings attest to the indispensable role of satellite AOD in the PM2.5 retrieval process through ML because it can significantly mitigate the negative impact of the sparse distribution of monitoring sites. This role becomes more important as the number of PM2.5 stations decreases.