Cloud Products

This is a list of Cloud Data from Satellite Sources

Areas of Interest: Sierra Nevada, West CONUS

Desired Temporal Resolution: hourly or sub-hourly

Desired Spatial Resolution: Same as MODIS SCA, 0.5km pixels ideal. Note that hourly or sub-hourly data may only be available at a more coarse resolution of 1/8 dgeree

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Minnis Group at NASA Langley Cloud and Radiation Research - VISST(day) and SIST(night) Algorithm Applied to GOES

NASA Langley Satellite Imagery and Cloud Products Page:[1]

Temporal Resolution: hourly

Spatial Resolution: pixel-level (4-km) retrievals and averages on a 0.3 or 0.5 degree latitude-longitude grid

Algorithm Description (short text): [2] Algorithm Description From Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program: [3] [4]

Format: Binary Pixel [5]

Code to unpack compressed data: [6]

Date Range: Oct 2003-Present

earlier satellite based retrievals that the Minnis group had been providing to ARM that were based on the Layered Bispectral Threshold Method (LBTM).

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GOES Surface and Insolation Products (GSIP) upgraded by CIMSS [7],[8] for NOAA New GOES Product: The GOES Surface and Insolation Products (GSIP) is a high spatial resolution (1/8 x 1/8 degrees) solar radiation product containing upwelling and downwelling shortwave (0.2-4.0 micrometers) and visible (0.4-0.7 micrometers) radiative fluxes at the top of the atmosphere and at the surface along with cloud fraction and skin temperature data. The product start date is 2 April 2009. For more information and to access these products please select from the product listing "GOES Surface and Insolation Products (GSIP)."

Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) site [9] Use the pull down menu and select "GOES Surface and Insolation Products (GSIP)

Browse of Data: [10] [11]

FAQ of GOES Surface and Insolation Products: [12]

Temporal Resolution: every hour on the hour for the Northern Hemisphere sectors, which contain CA)

Spatial Resolution: 1/8 degree (for the Northern Hemisphere sectors, which contain CA)

Algorithm Description:

Format: netCDF [13] Readable with MATLAB [14]

Date Range: 4/2/2009 to present. Contact William Straka III (UofWM,SSEC,CIMSS) says: You can make the request to back process data to NESDIS/SPSRB. However, as of now, there is no effort for re-processing this data unless funding becomes available. They may have the old GSIP-CONUS data as well

Other Hourly to GOES sto sort through

Tar'd GIFs of realtime from GOES sounder (algorithm unspecified): [15]

Compressed Text Files of GOES Sounder cloud properties (algorithm unspecified): [16] Unless otherwise noted, all satellite data are provided by the Data Center at the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) [17] of the University of Wisconsin - Madison

High Spatial, Low temporal Resolution

The Extended Clouds from AVHRR (CLAVR-x) system offers one platform for operational implementation of the volcanic ash algorithms (A. Heidinger).

Related Publications

Satellite-based estimates of longwave radiation for agricultural applications [18]

Analysis of Geostationary Satellite Imagery Using a Temporal-Differencing Technique <0001:AOGSIU>2.0.CO;2