Abstract
The Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT) experiment will measure the amount of methane and carbon monoxide in the Earth's atmosphere utilizing spectroscopy in the near Infrared (IR) (2.2, 2.3, and 4.7 μm). In this wavelength region, clouds confound the retrieval of methane and carbon monoxide by shielding both the surface and atmospheric emission below the clouds from MOPITT. A technique has been developed to detect cloudy pixels, and an algorithm has been developed to estimate clear sky radiance from cloud contaminated pixels. This process is validated using images from the MODIS Airborne Simulator (MAS). MAS images are comprised of 50 m pixels in comparison to the larger 22 km MOPITT pixels. We aggregate the higher resolution MAS data to simulate MOPITT pixels. The aggregation is analyzed for clear and cloudy conditions and a cloud fraction is calculated. The aggregate is then averaged to recreate the scene that MOPITT would have seen. The cloud detection algorithms are applied to the degraded MAS image. The results are compared to validate the techniques imbedded in the standard MOPITT processing stream.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 461-467 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering |
| Volume | 3756 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1999 |
| Event | Proceedings of the 1999 Optical Spectroscopic Techniques and Instrumentation for Atmospheric and Space Research III - Denver, CO, USA Duration: Jul 19 1999 → Jul 21 1999 |