Arid Zone Research ›› 2021, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (4): 1031-1039.doi: 10.13866/j.azr.2021.04.14

• Weather and Climate • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Evaluation of FY-2F satellite cloud products in Xinjiang

LI Shuai1(),CHEN Yonghang1(),HOU Xiaogang2,WANG Junhai3,XU Zhide4   

  1. 1. College of Evironmental Science and Engineering, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, China
    2. Institute of Network Technology, Beijing University of Postsand Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
    3. Urumqi Meteorological Satellite Surface Station, Urumqi 830001, Xinjiang, China
    4. ExecuJet Haite Aviation Services China Co., Ltd, Tianjin 300000, China
  • Received:2021-01-22 Revised:2021-02-25 Online:2021-07-15 Published:2021-08-03
  • Contact: Yonghang CHEN E-mail:rainlishuai@163.com;yonghangchen@126.com

Abstract:

Clouds are an important element of weather and climate characteristics: they affect atmospheric movement and the earth’s climate through three mechanisms: radiative forcing, latent heat forcing, and convective forcing. Cloud is also an important parameter of artificial water augmentation, which is of substantial significance to judge precipitation capacity. Total cloud products from satellite observation are suitable for revealing large-scale climate characteristics, and they have advantages in the plateau, desert, ocean, and other areas where data are scarce. Xinjiang is part of the arid area of Northwest China, where weather stations are sparsely distributed and the types of underlying surface are complex. Therefore, it is suited to the use of total cloud cover products inversed from satellite. However, the retrieval of the amount total cloud from satellite data in arid areas with complex underlying surfaces is a challenging task. Based on the hourly data of total cloud cover observed by ground observation stations from June 2015 to May 2016, we compared and evaluated the correlation and consistency between the FY-2F/CTA products and manually observed total cloud cover in Xinjiang region. We found that FY-2F/CTA correlates with the total cloud cover observed on the ground, except in winter in the area north of Tianshan Mountains, including Tianshan Mountains. Additionally, the consistency rate of FY-2F/CTA products in Xinjiang region was 51.5%, and there was little difference in cloud cover among the three regions of Xinjiang, which is higher in summer and autumn but lower in winter in the northern of Tianshan Mountains and lower in spring in southern Xinjiang. The amount of total cloud inverted from satellite data was generally lower than that observed by ground observation stations, especially in southern Xinjiang. Under different cloud cover levels, the consistency rate was inversely proportional to the total cloud cover: the consistency rate was higher under sunny and partly cloudy conditions and lower under cloudy and overcast conditions. Dust reduced the consistency rate of FY-2F/CTA, increased the strong rate, but it has little effect on the identification of cloud and non-cloud. This study provides an important reference for satellite retrieval and the application of total cloud cover in arid areas.

Key words: FY-2F, different cloud cover levels, impact of dust, total cloud cover, evaluation, Xinjiang