ACPD Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ACPD 1680-7375 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acpd-10-12629-2010 Assessment of the calibration performance of satellite visible channels using cloud targets: application to Meteosat-8/9 and MTSAT-1R Ham S.-H. 1 Sohn B. J. 1 School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, 151-747, Korea 17 05 2010 10 5 12629 12664 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/10/12629/2010/acpd-10-12629-2010.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/10/12629/2010/acpd-10-12629-2010.pdf

To examine the calibration performance of the Meteosat-8/9 Spinning Enhanced Visible Infra-Red Imager (SEVIRI) 0.640-μm and the Multi-functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT)-1R 0.724-μm channels, three calibration methods were employed. First, a ray-matching technique was used to compare Meteosat-8/9 and MTSAT-1R visible channel reflectances with the well-calibrated Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 0.646-μm channel reflectances. Spectral differences of the response function between the two channels of interest were taken into account for the comparison. Second, collocated MODIS cloud products were used as inputs to a radiative transfer model to calculate Meteosat-8/9 and MTSAT-1R visible channel reflectances. In the simulation, the three-dimensional radiative effect of clouds was taken into account and was subtracted from the simulated reflectance to remove the simulation bias caused by the plane-parallel assumption. Third, an independent method used the typical optical properties of deep convective clouds (DCCs) to simulate reflectances of selected DCC targets. Although the three methods were not in perfect agreement, the results suggest that calibration accuracies were within 5–10% for the Meteosat-8 0.640-μm channel, 4–9% for the Meteosat-9 0.640-μm channel, and up to 20% for the MTSAT-1R 0.724-μm channel. The results further suggest that the solar channel calibration scheme combining the three methods in this paper can be used as a tool to monitor the calibration performance of visible sensors that are particularly not equipped with an onboard calibration system.

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