Remote sensing, surveillance applications or telecommunications require optronic sensors, onboard satellite or airborne platform. Performances limitation of these sensors may be caused by cloud presence in the field of view. To take into account cloud presence, a Monte Carlo method is used. Geometrical and optical clouds properties necessary to build the model are obtained from CALIOP measureme...

[1] A strategy for retrieving aerosol optical depth (AOD) under conditions of thin cirrus coverage from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) is presented. We adopt an empirical method that derives the cirrus contribution to measured reflectance in seven bands from the visible to shortwave infrared (0.47, 0.55, 0.65, 0.86, 1.24, 1.63, and 2.12 μm, commonly used for AOD retri...

[1] The brightness temperature difference (BTD) between two thermal infrared bands is a common index for dust detection. However, the BTD is sensitive to the observed temperature, which hinders its use in automatic dust detection, especially over desert land surfaces. In this paper, a dynamic reference brightness temperature differences (DRBTD) algorithm was developed to detect dust by removing...

Volcanic eruptions are important causes of natural variability in the climate system at all time scales. Assessments of the climate impact of volcanic eruptions by climate models almost universally assume that sulfate aerosol is the only radiatively active volcanic material. We report satellite observations from the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) on board the Cloud-Ae...

Aerosol retrievals from multiple spaceborne sensors, including MODIS (on Terra and Aqua), MISR, OMI, POLDER, CALIOP, and SeaWiFS – altogether, a total of 11 different aerosol products – were comparatively analyzed using data collocated with ground-based aerosol observations from the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) stations within the Multi-sensor Aerosol Products Sampling System (MAPSS, http:...

Detection of clouds over polar areas from satellite radiometric measurements in the visible and IR atmospheric window region is rather difficult because of the high albedo of snow, possible ice covered surfaces, very low humidity, and the usual presence of atmospheric temperature inversion. Cold and highly reflective polar surfaces provide little thermal and visible contrast between clouds and ...

Although trends in the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) have been examined broadly but effects due to prevailing background conditions on these still remain uncertain, for which a multivariate regression trend model has implemented this study. Long-term AOD across globe are obtained from multi-satellite measurements that include MODerate resolution Imaging Spectral-radiometer (MODIS on-board Terra (...