Remote Sens. 2011, 3(4), 767-780; doi:10.3390/rs3040767
Article

The Role of Satellite Data Within GCOS Switzerland

Gabriela Seiz 1,* email, Nando Foppa 1 email, Marion Meier 1 email and Frank Paul 2 email
1 Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, Swiss GCOS Office, Kraehbuehlstrasse 58, P.O. Box 514, CH-8044 Zurich, Switzerland 2 Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 190, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 1 February 2011; in revised form: 10 March 2011 / Accepted: 16 March 2011 / Published: 11 April 2011
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Remote Sensing in Climate Monitoring and Analysis)
PDF Full-text Download PDF Full-Text [1993 KB, uploaded 11 April 2011 16:22 CEST]
Abstract: The Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) was established in 1992 to ensure that the observations necessary to address climate-related issues are defined, obtained and made available, to all potential users. The Swiss GCOS Office at the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss has the task of coordinating all climate relevant measurements in Switzerland (GCOS Switzerland). As such, the Swiss GCOS Office also fosters the exploration of new measurement techniques and methods, in particular through the use of satellite-based data, to complement the long-term in situ observations in Switzerland. In this paper, the role of satellites is presented for climatological studies of atmospheric and terrestrial Essential Climate Variables in Switzerland. For the atmospheric domain, the 10-year climatology March 2000–February 2010 of cloud cover from MODIS is shown for Switzerland, in low (1° × 1°) and high (0.05° × 0.05°) resolution, and compared to ground-based synop observations. For the terrestrial domain, the satellite-derived Swiss glacier inventory from 1998/99 and the new Alpine-wide inventory from 2003 is presented along with area changes derived from a comparison with previous inventories.
Keywords: clouds; glaciers; climatology; mountains; GCOS; ECV; satellites; Switzerland

Article Statistics

Click here to load and display the download statistics.

Cite This Article

MDPI and ACS Style

Seiz, G.; Foppa, N.; Meier, M.; Paul, F. The Role of Satellite Data Within GCOS Switzerland. Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 767-780.

AMA Style

Seiz G, Foppa N, Meier M, Paul F. The Role of Satellite Data Within GCOS Switzerland. Remote Sensing. 2011; 3(4):767-780.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Seiz, Gabriela; Foppa, Nando; Meier, Marion; Paul, Frank. 2011. "The Role of Satellite Data Within GCOS Switzerland." Remote Sens. 3, no. 4: 767-780.

Remote Sens. EISSN 2072-4292 Published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland RSS E-Mail Table of Contents Alert