Summertime Continental Shallow Cumulus Cloud Detection Using GOES-16 Satellite and Ground-Based Stereo Cameras at the DOE ARM Southern Great Plains Site

Summertime continental shallow cumulus clouds (ShCu) are detected using Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16 reflectance data, with cross-validation by observations from ground-based stereo cameras at the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Pl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2021-06, Vol.13 (12), p.2309
Main Authors: Tian, Jingjing, Zhang, Yunyan, Klein, Stephen A., Wang, Likun, Öktem, Rusen, Romps, David M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Advanced Baseline Imager
Atmospheric boundary layer
Atmospheric radiation
Cameras
cloud
Clouds
Cumulus clouds
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
GOES satellites
GOES-16
GOES-R
Ground-based observation
Meteorological satellites
Precipitation
Radar
Radiation
Radiation measurement
Reflectance
Remote sensing
shallow cumulus clouds
Sky
stereo camera
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Summary:Summertime continental shallow cumulus clouds (ShCu) are detected using Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16 reflectance data, with cross-validation by observations from ground-based stereo cameras at the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Plains site. A ShCu cloudy pixel is identified when the GOES reflectance exceeds the clear-sky surface reflectance by a reflectance detection threshold of ShCu, ΔR. We firstly construct diurnally varying clear-sky surface reflectance maps and then estimate the ∆R. A GOES simulator is designed, projecting the clouds reconstructed by stereo cameras towards the surface along the satellite’s slanted viewing direction. The dynamic ShCu detection threshold ΔR is determined by making the GOES cloud fraction (CF) equal to the CF from the GOES simulator. Although there are temporal variabilities in ΔR, cloud fractions and cloud size distributions can be well reproduced using a constant ΔR value of 0.045. The method presented in this study enables daytime ShCu detection, which is usually falsely reported as clear sky in the GOES-16 cloud mask data product. Using this method, a new ShCu dataset can be generated to bridge the observational gap in detecting ShCu, which may transition into deep precipitating clouds, and to facilitate further studies on ShCu development over heterogenous land surface.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs13122309