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

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Final revised paper (published on 15 Dec 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 23 Mar 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'amt-2020-37 Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 18 Jul 2020
- AC1: 'Reply to comments of Anonymous Referee #1', Jędrzej S. Bojanowski, 10 Sep 2020
RC2: 'Comment on Dissecting effects of orbital drift of polar-orbiting satellites onaccuracy and trends of cloud fractional cover climate data records', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Aug 2020
- AC2: 'Reply to comments of Anonymous Referee #2', Jędrzej S. Bojanowski, 10 Sep 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Jędrzej S. Bojanowski on behalf of the Authors (14 Sep 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Sep 2020) by Andrew Sayer

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (22 Oct 2020)

ED: Publish as is (22 Oct 2020) by Andrew Sayer

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.