Spectral Aging Model Applied to Meteosat First Generation Visible Band

The Meteosat satellites have been operational since the early eighties, creating so far a continuous time period of observations of more than 30 years. In order to use this data for climate data records, a consistent calibration is necessary between the consecutive instruments. Studies have shown that the Meteosat First Generation (MFG) satellites (1982–2006) suffer from in-flight degradation which is spectral of nature and is not corrected by the official calibration of EUMETSAT. Continuing on previous published work by the same authors, this paper applies the spectral aging model to a set of clear-sky and cloudy targets, and derives the model parameters for all six MFG satellites (Meteosat-2 to -7). Several problems have been encountered, both due to the instrument and due to geophysical occurrences, and these are discussed and illustrated here in detail. The paper shows how the spectral aging model is an improvement compared to the EUMETSAT calibration method with a stability of 1%–2% for Meteosat-4 to -7, which increases up to 6% for ocean sites using the full MFG time period.