Developing a mathematical model to estimate AOD using selected meteorological parameters and exploring their impact on air quality using data from multi-spectral sensors in the period of 2009-2020 over Dire Dawa, Ethiopia

Abstract

Understanding the influence of meteorological parameters that contribute to the Aer-osol Optical Depth (AOD) is an important aspect towards analyzing climate change and regional air quality. In this study, the meteorological data from 2009 to 2020 are applied to analyze the contributions of rainfall, wind speed, relative humidity and temperature as well as their combined effects on AOD over Dire Dawa in the study period. The correlation results show that for MODIS-Aqua, rainfall depicted a good correlation with AOD in autumn season. An improvement for estimation of AOD us-ing rainfall was obtained when it is fitted non-linearly, i.e., quadratically which re-sulted a significant correlation of R2 (0.872.) though it makes estimation of AOD from rainfall slightly difficult. MODIS-Terra revealed a satisfactory correlation with wind speed R2(0.38) in summer season, R2 (0.337) in winter season, and R2(0.445) in spring season but all with poor slopes. MODIS-Terra AOD demonstrated poor slopes in all seasons. The result show that only rainfall showed slight positive corre-lations with MODIS-T AOD during the wet months and with MODIS-A AOD during the dry months. The result suggest that climatic variations strongly affect the AOD, with a strong dependence in autumn and summer seasons over Dire Dawa. The study provides useful information to investigate the impacts of meteorological parameters have on aerosol dispersion, concentration and air quality in a region.