Abstract
Wind fields have been estimated from the displacement of clouds in successive METEOSAT infrared (IR: 10.5–12.5 μm) images for more than a decade. The derivation of cloud motion winds (hereafter: CMW) workss fully automatically, man-machine interaction is only performed as the very last step of manual quality control. At present about 3000 wind vectors per day are produced with four production runs and disseminated via the Global Telecommunication System (GTS) mainly for use in the analysis for numerical weather prediction. In this paper the improvements to the CMW derivation from METEOSAT images are described. In particular the height assignment of a wind vector and radiance filtering techniques preceding the cloud tracking have ameliorated the errors in METEOSAT winds significantly. The low speed bias of high level CMWs (< 400 hPa) in comparison with radiosonde winds has been reduced by more than 60% since 1987. This has significantly enhanced the usefulness of CMWs for the global analysis/forecast systems and hence their potential for climate diagnostic studies.
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