Advancements in Morphological Compositing of Polar-Orbiting Satellite Imagery

“Morphological compositing” is the manipulation of imagery from disparate sources to create natural, high temporal-resolution composites that efficiently synthesize the images' visual information. Here we present the results of two related applications of morphological compositing: 1) MIMIC-TPW2, which creates global, hourly visualization of total preciptitable water (TPW) retrievals from POES, SNPP, Metop and DMSP sources using an efficient management of real-time data; and 2) Alaska Cloud Products, which creates 30-minute resolution geostationary-like real-time animations of polar-satellite-derived cloud products over Alaska. Quantitative validation shows significantly improved accuracy over conventional compositing, but more importantly, the ability of end-users to interpret the imagery is greatly enhanced.