Some radiation budget and cloud measurements derived from Meteosat 1 data

Abstract

Visible and infrared digitally encoded images from Meteosat 1 have been converted into broadband reflected and emitted irradiances in order to derive the radiation budget of the underlyingsurface/atmosphere. These fluxes were determined once an hour over Western Europe for August 21, 1978, averaged over a 1° lat/long grid. This has allowed a daily mean to becalculated from the twenty-four observations and a standard deviation, a measure of the diurnalvariability of the albedo and emitted irradiance. In addition, cloud amounts at three levels werederived every hour. The algorithms developed could in principle be applied to determiningradiation budget and cloud parameters in real time from geostationary data, allowing an archiveof satellite derived data to be collected.