Some radiation budget and cloud measurements derived from Meteosat 1 data

Visible and infrared digitally encoded images from Meteosat 1 have been converted into broad band reflected and emitted irradiances in order to derive the radiation budget of the underlying surface/atmosphere. These fluxes were determined once an hour over Western Europe for August 21, 1978, averaged over a 1° lat/long grid. This has allowed a daily mean to be calculated from the twenty-four observations and a standard deviation, a measure of the diurnal variability of the albedo and emitted irradiance. In addition, cloud amounts at three levels were derived every hour. The algorithms developed could in principle be applied to determining radiation budget and cloud parameters in real time from geostationary data, allowing an archive of satellite derived data to be collected.