Dissecting effects of orbital drift of polar-orbiting satellites on accuracy and trends of climate data records of cloud fractional cover

Bojanowski, Jędrzej S.; Musiał, Jan P.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-6771-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-6771-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-6771-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

Research article

|

15 Dec 2020

Research article |

| 15 Dec 2020

Dissecting effects of orbital drift of polar-orbiting satellites on accuracy and trends of climate data records of cloud fractional cover

Jędrzej S. Bojanowski and Jan P. Musiał

Data sets

CLARA-A2: CM SAF cLoud, Albedo and surface RAdiation dataset from AVHRR data – Edition 2 K.-G., Karlsson, K. Anttila, J. Trentmann, M. Stengel, F. J. Meirink, A. Devasthale, T. Hanschmann, S. Kothe, E. Jääskeläinen, J. Sedlar, N. Benas, G.-J. van Zadelhoff, C. Schlundt, D. Stein, S. Finkensieper, N. Håkansson, R. Hollmann, P. Fuchs, and M. Werscheck https://doi.org/10.5676/EUM_SAF_CM/CLARA_AVHRR/V002

CM SAF ClOud Fractional Cover dataset from METeosat First and Second Generation – Edition 1 (COMET Ed. 1) R. Stöckli, A. Duguay-Tetzlaff, J. S. Bojanowski, R. Hollmann, P. Fuchs, and M. Werscheck https://doi.org/10.5676/EUM_SAF_CM/CFC_METEOSAT/V001

Cloud Detection with Historical Geostationary Satellite Sensors for Climate Applications R. Stöckli, J. S. Bojanowski, V. O. John, A. Duguay-Tetzlaff, Q. Bourgeois, J. Schulz, and R. Hollmann https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11091052

Short summary

Satellites such as NOAA's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer can uniquely observe changes in cloud cover but are affected by orbital drift that results in shifted image acquisition times, which in turn lead to spurious trends in cloud cover detected during climatological analyses. Providing a detailed quantification of these trends, we show that climate data records must be analysed with caution, as for some periods and regions they do not comply with the requirements for climate data.