Adjusting ISCCP Cloud Detection to Increase Consistency of Cloud Amount and Reduce Artifacts

Abstract

AbstractThe International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) began collecting data in the 1980s to help understand the distribution of clouds. Since then, it has provided important information on clouds in time and space and their radiative characteristics. However, it was apparent from some long-term time series of the data that there are some latent artifacts related to the changing satellite coverage over the more than 30 years of the record. Changes in satellite coverage effectively create secular changes in the time series of view zenith angle (VZA) for a given location. There is an inconsistency in the current ISCCP cloud detection algorithm related to VZA: two satellites viewing the same location from different VZAs can produce vastly different estimates of cloud amount. Research is presented that shows that a simple change to the cloud detection algorithm can vastly increase the consistency. This is accomplished by making the cloud–no cloud threshold VZA dependent. The resulting cloud amounts are more consistent between different satellites and the distributions are shown to be more spatially homogenous. Likewise, the more consistent spatial data lead to more consistent temporal statistics.