Temporal and spatial changes of aerosols characteristics was investigated to improve understandings of haze in winters of Wuhan, based on measurements of a CIMEL sun-sky radiometer and a modified Dark Target (DT) method. A large increase in no-absorbing and fine-mode particle is the main characteristic of aerosol during winter haze periods. From no-haze to haze conditions, aerosol optical depth (AOD), fine-mode peak value of size distribution, and single scattering albedo increased respectively from 0.46, 0.47 µm<sup>3</sup>/µm<sup>2</sup>, and 0.84 to 0.93, 0.91 µm<sup>3</sup>/µm<sup>2</sup>, and 0.87. Based on above aerosol optical and microphysical properties, we re-calculated aerosol models and improved the DT method. Results showed that our improvement increased the expect error (%) from 17.9 to 70.9. Spatial distributions revealed that heavy aerosol loading often occurred in rural and suburban areas rather than city centre. With the haze developing, the AOD increased by ∼0.3 over north of Wuhan and showed a downward trend from north to south.