Comment on amt-2022-217

Abstract

Aerosol optical depth (AOD) is used to characterize aerosol loadings within Earth’s atmosphere. Sun photometers measure AOD from the Earth’s surface based on direct-sunlight intensity readings by spectrally narrow light detectors. However, when the solar disk is partially obscured by cloud cover, sun photometer measurements can be biased due to the interaction of sunlight with cloud constituents. We present a novel deep transfer learning model on all-sky images to support more accurate AOD retrievals. We used three independent image datasets for training and testing: the novel Northern Colorado All-Sky Image (NCASI), the Whole Sky Image SEGmentation (WSISEG), and the METCRAX-II datasets from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). We visually partitioned all-sky images into three categories: 1) clear sky around the solar disk, 2) thin cirrus obstructing the solar disk, and 3) thick, non-cirrus clouds obstructing the solar disk. Two-thirds of the images were allocated for training and one-third were allocated for testing. We trained models based on all possible combinations of the training sets. The best-performing model successfully classified 95.5 %, 96.9 %, and 89.1 % of testing images from NCASI, METCRAX-II and WSISEG datasets, respectively. Our results demonstrate that all-sky imaging with deep transfer learning can be applied toward cloud screening, which would aid ground-based AOD measurements.