Cloud motion in the GOCI/COMS ocean colour data

Abstract

The Geostationary Ocean Colour Imager (GOCI) instrument, on Korea’s Communications, Oceans, and Meteorological Satellite (COMS), can produce a spectral artefact arising from the motion of clouds – the cloud is spatially shifted and the amount of shift varies by spectral band. The length of time it takes to acquire all eight GOCI bands for a given slot (portion of a scene) is sufficient to require that cloud motion be taken into account to fully mask or correct the effects of clouds in all bands. Inter-band correlations can be used to measure the amount of cloud shift, which can then be used to adjust the cloud mask so that the union of all shifted masks can act as a mask for all bands. This approach reduces the amount of masking required versus a simple expansion of the mask in all directions away from clouds. Cloud motion can also affect regions with unidentified clouds – thin or fractional clouds that evade the cloud identification process – yielding degraded quality in retrieved ocean colour parameters. Areas with moving and unidentified clouds require more elaborate masking algorithms to remove these degraded retrievals. Correction for the effects of moving fractional clouds may also be possible. The cloud shift information can be used to determine cloud motion and thus wind at the cloud levels on sub-minute timescales. The beneficial and negative effects of moving clouds should be considered for any ocean colour instrument design and associated data processing plans.