A comparison of satellite-derived cloud products with ground-based measurements

Geostationary satellites provide a unique perspective of being able to look at one part of the earth over the entire day. In the United States, two Geostationary Operation Environmental Satellites (GOES), operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), monitors weather as well as information about the space environment, search-and-rescue data, and relay ground-based environmental platform data. A major upgrade to this system, known as GOES-R, is under development, with a first launch scheduled for late 2012. Included on the GOES-R satellites will be the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). As with the current GOES imager, the ABI will be used for a wide range of qualitative and quantitative weather, climate and environmental applications. The ABI, however, has more spectral bands than the current GOES imager, from to 16 spectral bands, including all of the current imager bands, including both the 12 and 13 micron bands. In addition, the ABI will have improved spectral resolution over the current GOES imager. In preparation for the launch of GOES-R, the use of several currently operating instruments is being used to test and validate algorithms that will be used for the ABI. One of these instruments being used to test the ABI algorithms is the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI), which are on board the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) Meteosat Second Generation satellites, MET-08 and MET-09. This study will employ ABI prototype algorithms applied to SEVIRI data to compare satellite-derived estimates of effective radius, cloud optical depth, cloud height, liquid/ice water path to surface validation data from the CloudNET sites in Europe. CloudNET is a research project supported by the European Commission that uses active instruments (lidar and radar) to obtain results in detailed vertical profiles of important cloud parameters. These data will be compared for two months during the operational time of MET-08.