An image of cloud cover, sea surface temperatures, and land temperatures
| This global montage gives the clouds and the surface temperatures over the whole Earth. It is a "Mollweide projection" composite image of cloud top, synoptic observation, and sea surface temperatures. The cloud image is a combination of GMS, GOES-8 and Meteosat imagery. A grid of temperatures, obtained from synoptic observations every six hours, is made into an image and merged with an image of Sea Surface Temperatures, generated daily from an NMC SST grid. An algorithm was created to compare the surface temperature (SST over water or synoptic observation temperature over land) with the infrared temperatures from the satellite imagery. Using this algorithm, the composite image uses the cloud values if an IR temperature is more than 14 degrees Kelvin colder than the surface temperature. This algorithm improved cloud/no-cloud classification by including marine stratus and filtering out clear areas that are very cold, such as polar regions. |
Credit: SSEC, University of Wisconsin-Madison
For more info: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/