SATELLITE- AND GROUND-BASED STEREO ANALYSIS OF CLOUDS

Abstract

The interest to monitor cloud properties from space- and ground-based observations is based on the large influence that clouds have on the Earth and Atmosphere energy balance. The quantitative 3D description of clouds is important for refined methods in nowcasting and the modeling of weather and climate.Multi-angle Earth Observation (EO) image data from ATSR2 (onboard ERS-2), AATSR (onboard Envisat) and MISR (onboard EOS-Terra) were used to estimate cloud-top height (CTH) . Because of the cloud advection within the time delay between the acquisition of two different viewing angles from one polar-orbiting satellite, the preliminary cloud-top heights had to be corrected by this wind induced error. This paper describes the methodology for CTH estimation from multi-view satellite sensors, including wind correction with cloud-top winds (CTW) extracted from Meteosat images. The presented case studies include validation with independent data, i.e. our new ground-based stereo camera system, ground-based radar, soundings and CTHs from other satellites and/or retrieval techniques. Finally, a case study is shown where the satellite- and ground-based 3D cloud boundary results were combined.