MODIS water vapor products have become important atmospheric water vapor productsdue to their advantages of high spatial resolution, however, due to uncertain factors such as precipitation, cloud mask, and surface reflection spectrum, the inversion accuracy is limited. To effectively improve the quality of MODIS water vapor products, this article analyzes nonlinear factors such as cloud, land cover type, pixel attitude, time, and position, and a MODIS PWV neural network differential correction model integrating multiple nonlinear factors is constructed for the first time. Firstly, the correlation between MODIS PWV and GNSS PWVat the same site is analyzed, PWV_diff (the difference between the two) is taken as the target value of the neural network model, and the input information for the model is 19 nonlinear factors such as cloud mask confidence, land cover type, periodic day of year, periodic hour of day, sensor zenith angle, solar zenith angle, sensor azimuth angle, and solar azimuth angle. Compared with traditional linear correction model, the root mean square error (RMSE) of corrected MODIS PWV is reduced from 3.271 3 mm to 2.360 2 mm, and the accuracy is improved by 27.85%. The performance of the model isalso evaluated by using high spatiotemporal ERA5 PWV data as a reference value. The experimental results show that the corrected RMSE of the corrected MODIS PWV using the proposed model in this paper is 2.037 4 mm, which improves the accuracy by 57.99% compared to the uncorrected MODIS PWV (RMSE=4.850 3 mm); furthermore, neural network differential correction models are constructed for MODIS PWV products under four different confidence levels provided by cloud mask products, the results show that the RMSEs of MODIS PWV products with cloud confidence levels >99%, >95%, >66%, and <66% are increased by 60.03%, 61.21%, 55.72%, and 54.57% compared to uncorrected MODIS PWV. This indicates that the model constructed in this article has high universality in improving the accuracy of MODIS PWV products under various cloud covers, and is expected to provide high-precision water vapor information for climate change and rainfall forecasting research.
