VOL. 7: Cloud Screening for Polar Orbiting Visible and IR Satellite Sensors.
Citation:
Darzi, M., 1992: Cloud Screening for Polar Orbiting Visible and IR Satellite Sensors.
NASA Tech. Memo. 104566, Vol. 7, S.B. Hooker and E.R. Firestone, Eds., NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, 7 pp.
Methods for detecting and screening cloud contamination from satellite derived visible
and infrared data are reviewed in this document. The methods are applicable to past,
present, and future polar orbiting satellite radiometers. Such instruments include the
Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS), operational from 1978 through 1986; the Advanced
Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR); the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view
Sensor (SeaWiFS), scheduled for launch in August 1993; and the Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS). Constant threshold methods are the least demanding
computationally, and often provide adequate results. An improvement to these methods
is to determine the thresholds dynamically by adjusting them according to the areal and
temporal distributions of the surrounding pixels. Spatial coherence methods set
thresholds based on the expected spatial variability of the data. Other statistically derived
methods and various combinations of basic methods are also reviewed. The complexity
of the methods is ultimately limited by the computing resources. Finally, some criteria
for evaluating cloud screening methods are discussed.
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