Preliminary verification for application of a support vector machine-based cloud detection method to GOSAT-2 CAI-2

Abstract. The Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) was launched in 2009 to measure global atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ concentrations. GOSAT is equipped with two sensors: the Thermal And Near infrared Sensor for carbon Observations (TANSO)-Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) and TANSO-Cloud and Aerosol Imager (CAI). The presence of clouds in the instantaneous field of view of the FTS leads to incorrect estimates of the concentrations. Thus, the FTS data suspected to have cloud contamination must be identified by a CAI cloud discrimination algorithm and rejected. Conversely, overestimating clouds reduces the amount of FTS data that can be used to estimate greenhouse gas concentrations. This is a serious problem in tropical rainforest regions, such as the Amazon, where the amount of useable FTS data is small because of cloud cover. Preparations are continuing for the launch of the GOSAT-2 in fiscal year 2018. To improve the accuracy of the estimates of greenhouse gases concentrations, we need to refine the existing CAI cloud discrimination algorithm: Cloud and Aerosol Unbiased Decision Intellectual Algorithm (CLAUDIA1). A new cloud discrimination algorithm using a support vector machine (CLAUDIA3) was developed and presented in another paper. Although the use of visual inspection of clouds as a standard for judging is not practical for screening a full satellite data set, it has the advantage of allowing for locally optimized thresholds, while CLAUDIA1 and -3 use common global thresholds. Thus, the accuracy of visual inspection is better than that of these algorithms in most regions, with the exception of snow- and ice-covered surfaces, where there is not enough spectral contrast to identify cloud. In other words, visual inspection results can be used as truth data for accuracy evaluation of CLAUDIA1 and -3. For this reason visual inspection can be used for the truth metric for the cloud discrimination verification exercise. In this study, we compared CLAUDIA1–CAI and CLAUDIA3–CAI for various land cover types, and evaluated the accuracy of CLAUDIA3–CAI by comparing both CLAUDIA1–CAI and CLAUDIA3–CAI with visual inspection (400  ×  400 pixels) of the same CAI images in tropical rainforests. Comparative results between CLAUDIA1–CAI and CLAUDIA3–CAI for various land cover types indicated that CLAUDIA3–CAI had a tendency to identify bright surface and optically thin clouds. However, CLAUDIA3–CAI had a tendency to misjudge the edges of clouds compared with CLAUDIA1–CAI. The accuracy of CLAUDIA3–CAI was approximately 89.5 % in tropical rainforests, which is greater than that of CLAUDIA1–CAI (85.9 %) for the test cases presented here.