Since 1983 CIRA has been a Sector Processing Center for collection of 3-hourly full disk geostationary satellite data for the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP). CIRA's primary goal has been collection of the USA GOES-West positioned satellite but over the years data has been collected and processed from GOES-East, Meteosat, and INSAT. Our ISCCP funded research includes studies of the long-term cloud variability, diurnal studies, and statistical representation of both the derived cloud amounts and radiances. CIRA has explored the Climatological and Historical Analysis of Clouds for Envrionmental Simulations (CHANCES) dataset. CHANCES is a high-resolution, global, hourly, 5 km, visible and infrared cloud database spanning 3 years. High resolution cloud climatologies over portions of the globe can be created with CHANCES. Additional years of CHANCES have been added for regions of special interest. An example from the Middle East during April 2003 is shown here. The NOAA RAMM team at CIRA has been creating high resolution cloud climatologies from GOES data to use as a training, planning and forecasting tool for the National Weather Service.
Some current work on the lifetime of cirrus clouds is shown in this talk presented at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies by Zhengzhao (Johnny) Luo, a CIRA postdoc.
How are global precipitation, evaporation, and the cycling of water changing?
How well can long-term climatic trends be assessed or predicted?
What trends in atmospheric constituents and solar radiation are driving global climate?
In order to address these critical NASA Earth Science Enterprise questions (Asrar et al BAMS July 2001), CIRA is examining data from the NASA Water Vapor Project (NVAP). NVAP is a NASA-sponsored project to combine or blend the best available water vapor data-sets into a global, daily, total column and layered water vapor product. This creation of the dataset was undertaken at STC-METSAT Inc. and results are used in many different CIRA climate studies. These include comparison with lower tropospheric temperature, water vapor radiative forcing and transports. NVAP data now covers the time period from 1988 - 2001 and has been cited in over 75 refereed publications. CIRA scientists have contributed to the NVAP algorithms and to the interpretation of NVAP results.
CIRA has a long involvement with Earth radiation budget measurements. The ERBE instrument was launched in 1984 and designed at CSU and Ball Aerospace. CIRA scientists are members of the GERB science team. GERB is a radiation budget sensor onboard the geostationary Meteosat Second Generation satellite.<link>
CIRA houses the Data Processing Center for the upcoming NASA CloudSat mission, scheduled for launch in 2005. CloudSat will be the first space platform to fly a 94 GHz cloud radar. It will fly in formation with NASA's Aqua satellite and the French Calipso spacecraft. CloudSat science products, such as cloud geometric profile, cloud optical depth and cloud liquid and ice water content will be created at CIRA. CloudSat will provide scientists with the most comprehensive view of Earth's clouds ever taken.
Last updated September 2003.
