A Spectral Aging Model for the Meteosat-7 Visible Band

Abstract

Abstract For more than 30 years, the Meteosat satellites have been in a geostationary orbit around the earth. Because of the high temporal frequency of the data and the long time period, this database is an excellent candidate for fundamental climate data records (FCDRs). One of the prerequisites to create FCDRs is an accurate and stable calibration over the full data period. Because of the presence of contamination on the instrument in space, a degradation of the visible band of the instruments has been observed. Previous work on the Meteosat First Generation satellites, together with results from other spaceborne instruments, led to the idea that there is a spectral component to this degradation. This paper describes the model that was created to correct the Meteosat-7 visible (VIS) channel for these spectral aging effects. The model assumes an exponential temporal decay for the gray part of the degradation and a linear temporal decay for the wavelength-dependent part. The effect of these two parts of the model is tuned according to three parameters; 253 clear-sky stable earth targets with different surface types are used together with deep convective cloud measurements to fit these parameters. The validation of the model leads to an overall stability of the Meteosat-7 reflected solar radiation data record of about 0.66 W m−2 decade−1.