| Summary: | Quantifying aerosol compositions (e.g., type, loading) from remotely sensed measurements by spaceborne, suborbital and ground-based platforms is a challenging task. In this study, the first and second-order spectral derivatives of aerosol optical depth (AOD) with respect to wavelength are explored to determine the partitions of the major components of aerosols based on the spectral dependence of their particle optical size and complex refractive index. With theoretical simulations from the Second Simulation of a Satellite Signal in the Solar Spectrum (6S) model, AOD spectral derivatives are characterized for collective models of aerosol types, such as mineral dust (DS) particles, biomass-burning (BB) aerosols and anthropogenic pollutants (AP), as well as stretching out to the mixtures among them. Based on the intrinsic values from normalized spectral derivatives, referenced as the Normalized Derivative Aerosol Index (NDAI), a unique pattern is clearly exhibited for bounding the major aerosol components; in turn, fractions of the total AOD (<i>f</i>AOD) for major aerosol components can be extracted. The subtlety of this NDAI method is examined by using measurements of typical aerosol cases identified carefully by the ground-based Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) sun–sky spectroradiometer. The results may be highly practicable for quantifying <i>f</i>AOD among mixed-type aerosols by means of the normalized AOD spectral derivatives.
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