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
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).
GOES Surface and Insolation Products (GSIP) upgraded by CIMSS [7] 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 [8] Use the pull down menu and select "GOES Surface and Insolation Products (GSIP)
FAQ of GOES Surface and Insolation Products: [11]
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 [12] Readable with MATLAB [13]
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): [14]
Compressed Text Files of GOES Sounder cloud properties (algorithm unspecified): [15] Unless otherwise noted, all satellite data are provided by the Data Center at the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) [16] 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).
