The role and potential management of short-lived atmospheric pollutants such as aerosols are currently a topic of scientific and public debates. Our limited knowledge of atmospheric aerosol and its influence on the Earth's radiation balance has a significant impact on the accuracy and error of current predictions of future climate change. In the last few years, there have been several accounts of the changes in atmospheric aerosol derived from satellite observations, but no study considering the uncertainty caused by different/limited temporal sampling of polar-orbiting satellites and cloud disturbance in the trend estimates of cloud-free aerosol optical thickness (AOT). This study presents an approach to minimize the uncertainties by use of weighted least-squares regression and multiple satellite-derived AOTs from the space-born instruments, MODIS (onboard Terra from 2000 to 2009 and Aqua form 2003 to 2008), MISR (Terra from 2000 to 2010), and SeaWiFS (OrbView-2 from 1998 to 2007) and thereby provides more convincing trend estimates for atmospheric aerosols during the past decade. The AOT decreases over western Europe (i.e., by up to about ?40% from 2003 to 2008). In contrast, a statistically significant increase (about +34% in the same period) over eastern China is observed and can be attributed to the increase in both industrial output and Asian desert dust.
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机译：空气罗尔等短期大气污染物的作用和潜在管理目前是科学和公开辩论的主题。我们对大气气溶胶的有限知识及其对地球辐射平衡的影响对当前气候变化的准确性和误差产生了重大影响。在过去的几年里，有几个关于卫星观察的大气气溶胶的变化的叙述，但没有考虑到在云趋势趋势估算中的不同/有限的卫星和云扰动引起的不确定性。自由气溶胶光学厚度（AOT）。本研究提出了一种方法，可以通过使用加权最小二乘回归和来自空间出生的仪器的多颗卫星衍生的AOTs来最小化不确定性，MODIS（从2000年到2009年到2009年和2008年的Aqua Form 2008到2008年），Misr（来自2000年至2010年）和Seawifs（Orbview-2从1998年到2007年），从而提供了在过去十年中对大气气溶胶的更令人信服的趋势估计。 AOT在西欧减少（即，最多约40％，从2003年到2008年）。相比之下，观察到中国东部的统计上大幅增加（同一时期约+ 34％），可归因于工业产出和亚洲沙漠粉尘的增加。
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