The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instruments onboard the series of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites offer the longest available meteorological data records from space. These satellites have drifted in orbit resulting in shifts in the local time sampling during the life span of the sensors onboard. Depending upon the amplitude of the diurnal cycle of the geophysical parameters derived, orbital drift
may cause spurious trends in their time series. We investigate
tropical deep convective clouds, which show pronounced diurnal
cycle amplitude, to estimate an upper bound of the impact of orbital drift on their time series. We carry out a rotated empirical orthogonal function analysis (REOF) and show that the REOFs are useful in delineating orbital drift signal and, more importantly, in subtracting this signal in the time series of convective cloud amount. These results will help facilitate the derivation of homogenized data series of
cloud amount from NOAA satellite sensors and ultimately
analyzing trends from them. However, we suggest detailed
comparison of various methods and rigorous testing thereof
applying final orbital drift corrections.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-177609 |
| Date | 26 August 2015 |
| Creators | Devasthale, Abhay, Karlsson, Karl-Göran, Quaas, Johannes, Graßl, Hartmut |
| Contributors | Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Atmospheric Remote Sensing, Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie,, Universität Leipzig, Institut für Meteorologie, Copernicus Publications, |
| Publisher | Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:article |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Atmospheric measurement techniques (2012) 5, S. 267-273 |
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