What is it about?
The advent of the Visible/Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on board Suomi/NPP (SNPP) satellite made it possible to retrieve a new class of convective cloud properties and of the aerosols that they ingest. An automated mapping system of retrieval of some properties of convective cloud fields over large areas at the scale of satellite coverage was developed and presented. The system is named AMCC (Automatic Mapping of Convective Clouds). The AMCC identifies the cloudy pixels of convective elements; retrieves for each pixel its temperature, cloud drop effective radius, cloud base temperature, cloud base height, cloud base updraft, cloud condensation nuclei concentration. The results are gridded 36 km×36 km data points at nadir, which are sufficiently large to capture the properties of a field of convective clouds, also sufficiently small to capture aerosol and dynamic perturbations.
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Why is it important?
The results of AMCC are instrumental in observing spatial co-variability in clouds and CCN properties and for obtaining the insights from such observations for natural and man-made causes. The AMCC generated maps are also useful for applications from numerical weather forecasting to climate models.
Perspectives
We hope that more people will use AMCC to help us improve AMCC.
Zhiguo Yue
Office of Weather Modification of Shaanxi Province of China
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Automated Mapping of Convective Clouds (AMCC) Thermodynamical, Microphysical, and CCN Properties from SNPP/VIIRS Satellite Data, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, April 2019, American Meteorological Society,
DOI: 10.1175/jamc-d-18-0144.1.
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