PERFORMANCE OF THE INTERACTIVE PROCEDURES FOR DAYTIME DETECTION OF DENSE CLOUDS IN THE MTI PIPELINE
Pixel-scale cloud detection relies on the simple fact that dense-enough clouds are generally brighter, whiter, and colder than the underlying surface. These plain-language statements are readily translated into threshold operations in the multispectral subspaces, thus providing a reasonable premise for searching data cubes for cloud signatures. To supplement this spectral input (VIS, NIR, and TIR channels), we remark that cloud tops are generally above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere column. An extra threshold in the MTI water vapor product can therefore be applied. This helps considerably in cases where one of the default cloud signatures becomes ambiguous. The resulting cloud mask is however still sensitive to the thresholds in brightness, whiteness, temperature, and column water content, especially since we also want to ag low-level clouds that are not-so-dense. Clouds are also generally spatially large compared to pixel size. This implies that simple spatial morphological filters can be use to remove false positives and for expansion of the cloud mask. A false positive is indeed preferable to a miss in the view of MTI's mission in support of nuclear non-proliferation; non-local cloud radiative effects can otherwise bias retrievals in adjacent cloud-free areas. Therefore we use a data analyst to ensure built-in quality control for MTI cloud masks. When looking for low-level clouds, the analyst interacts with a GUI containing histograms, a customized RGB rendering of the input data, and an RGB diagnostic cloud mask for quick evaluation of all threshold values. We use MTI data to document the performance and analyst-sensitivity to this procedure.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- US Department of Energy (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 776395
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-01-1617; TRN: AH200124%%137
- Resource Relation:
- Journal Volume: 4381; Conference: Conference title not supplied, Conference location not supplied, Conference dates not supplied; Other Information: PBD: 1 Mar 2001
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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