An Automatic Cloud Observation System (ACOS) and cloud cover calculation algorithm were developed to calculate the cloud cover at night, and the calculation results were compared with the cloud cover data of a manned observatory (Daejeon Regional Off...
Accurate daily snow cover extent is a significant input for hydrological applications in the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP). Although several Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) daily cloud-free snow cover products over the QTP...
Cloud cover is critical for astronomical sites because it can be used to assess the observability of the local sky and further the fractional photometric time. For cloud monitoring in site-testing campaigns with all-sky cameras, previous studies have...
Layered cloud cover (LCC), that is, cloud cover at different levels, is crucial for estimating cloud radiative effects and modeling climate change. However, accurate LCC characterization using passive satellite measurements is challenging because of...
Snow cover has significant impacts on the global water cycle, ecosystem, and climate change. At present, satellite remote sensing is regarded as the most efficient approach to detect long-term and multiscale observations of snow cover extent. The Vis...
Clouds limit the quality and availability of optical wavelength surface observations from Earth Observation (EO) satellites. This limitation is particularly relevant for the generation of systematic thematic products from EO medium spatial resolution...
Understanding long-term cloud cover variability is essential for assessing past climate dynamics and human influences on atmospheric conditions. In Padua, instrumental weather records (temperature, precipitation, pressure) and descriptive sky observa...
Clouds play a crucial role in Earth’s climate system by modulating radiation fluxes via reflection and scattering, and thus the slightest variation in their spatial coverage significantly alters the climate response. Until now, due to the spars...
Climate change is stated as one of the largest issues of our time, resulting in many unwanted effects on life on earth. Cloud fractional cover (CFC), the portion of the sky covered by clouds, might affect global warming and different other aspects of...
Urban land cover (ULC) serves as fundamental environmental information for urban studies, while accurate and timely ULC mapping remains challenging due to cloud contamination in tropical and subtropical areas. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has excel...
The CM SAF Cloud Fractional Cover dataset from Meteosat First and Second Generation (COMET, https://doi.org/10.5676/EUM_SAF_CM/CFC_METEOSAT/V001) covering 1991–2015 has been recently released by the EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility for C...
The feedback of vegetation on cloud cover is an important link in the global water cycle. However, the relative importance of vegetation and related factors (surface properties, heat fluxes, and environmental conditions) on cloud cover in the context...
This study introduced an innovative approach for detecting structural anomalies in road manhole covers using structured light cameras. Efforts have been dedicated to enhancing data quality by commencing with the acquisition and preprocessing of point...
Cloud changes and their attribution under global warming still remains a challenge in climatic change studies, especially in decomposing the fast and slow cloud responses to anthropogenic forcing. In this study, the responses of global cloud cover to...
The use of weather satellite recordings has been growing rapidly over the last three decades. Determining the patterns between meteorological and topographical features is an important scientific job. Cloud cover analysis and properties can be of the...
Comparing cloud cover (CC) products from different satellites with the same ground-based CC dataset provides information on the similarities or differences of values among satellite products. For this reason, 42-month CC products from Moderate Resolu...
Cloud obscuration is a major problem for using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) images in different applications. This issue poses serious difficulties in monitoring the snow cover in mountainous regions due to high cloudiness in...
Photovoltaic power generation must be predicted to counter the system instability caused by an increasing number of photovoltaic power-plant connections. In this study, a method for predicting the cloud volume and power generation using satellite ima...
Determining the optimum angle for a solar panel is important if tracking systems are not used and a tilt angle remains constant. This article determines the sensitivity of the optimum angle to surface reflectivity at different latitudes using a mathe...
Clouds can block solar radiation from reaching the surface, so timely and effective cloud cover test and forecasting is critical to the operation and economic efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) plants. Traditional cloud cover algorithms based on meteoro...
In order to deepen the knowledge of the seasonal variation in total cloud cover (TCC) in Xinjiang, China (XJ), a typical arid region, and to broaden the understanding of the seasonal variation in cloud type (CLT) in the region, we used TCC and CLT da...
Cloud cover is an important factor limiting the earth observation efficiency of optical imaging satellites. Existing solutions include avoiding cloudy observation time windows by onboard cloud detectors and ground monitors, which are difficult to imp...
Atmospheric transmissivity (τ) is a critical factor in climatology, which affects surface energy balance, measured at a limited number of meteorological stations worldwide. With the limited availability of meteorological datasets in remote areas acro...
Clouds are notoriously difficult to simulate. Here, we separate and quantify the impact of Pacific climate modes on total cloud cover (TCC) variability, using reliable satellite observations together with state-of-the art reanalysis outputs, over the...
Cloud cover hinders the effective use of vegetation indices from optical satellite-acquired imagery in cloudy agricultural production areas, such as Guangdong, a subtropical province in southern China which supports two-season rice production. The nu...
Greece is located over a climate-change-prone region. The aim of this study is to investigate the projection of cloud cover fraction and surface relative humidity during the period from 1970 to 2099. In this analysis, we use six high-resolution regio...
Forests play major roles in climate regulation, ecosystem services, carbon storage, biodiversity, terrain stabilization, and water retention, as well as in the economy of numerous countries. Nevertheless, deforestation and forest degradation are ramp...
The Qilian Mountains (QLM) are an important ecological barrier in western China. High-precision land cover data products are the basic data for accurately detecting and evaluating the ecological service functions of the QLM. In order to study the lan...
With the high resolution of optical data and the lack of weather effects of passive microwave data, we developed an algorithm to map daily cloud-free fractional snow cover (FSC) based on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) stand...
As important geospatial data, point cloud collected from an aerial laser scanner (ALS) provides three-dimensional (3D) information for the study of the distribution of typical urban land cover, which is critical in the construction of a “digita...
Accurate remote sensing and mapping of land cover in the tropics remain difficult tasks since data gaps and a heterogenic landscape make it challenging to perform land cover classification. In this paper, we proposed a multi-feature classification me...
Total Cloud Cover (TCC) retrieval from ground-based optical imagery is a problem that has been tackled by several generations of researchers. The number of human-designed algorithms for the estimation of TCC grows every year. However, there has been...
Large-scale spatial databases contain information of different objects in the public domain and are of great importance for many stakeholders. These data are not only used to inventory the different assets of the public domain but also for project pl...
Tracking land surface dynamics over cloud prone areas with complex mountainous terrain is an important challenge facing the Earth Science community. One such region is the Lake Kivu region in Central Africa. We developed a processing chain to systema...
Clouds are of high importance for the climate system but they still remain one of its principal uncertainties. Remote sensing techniques applied to satellite observations have assisted tremendously in the creation of long-term and homogeneous data re...
The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, characterized by its complex and fragile ecosystems, has faced ongoing ecological degradation in recent years, challenging national ecological security and sustainable development. To promote the sustainable deve...
Accurate land use/land cover (LULC) maps generated through cloud computing can support large-scale land management. Leveraging the rich resources of Google Earth Engine (GEE) is essential for developing historical maps that facilitate the analysis of...
Snow cover area is dramatically decreasing across the Los Andes Mountains and the most relevant water reservoir under drought conditions. In this sense, monitoring of snow cover is key to analyzing the hydrologic balance in snowmelt-driven basins. MO...
Detailed, accurate and frequent land cover mapping is a prerequisite for several important geospatial applications and the fulfilment of current sustainable development goals. This paper introduces a methodology for the classification of annual high-...
Due to the fact that invalid cloud-covered regions in remote sensing images consume a considerable quantity of coding bit rates under the limited satellite-to-ground transmission rate, existing image compression methods suffer from low compression ef...
Snow cover plays an important role in biotic and abiotic environmental processes, as well as human activities, on both regional and global scales. Due to the difficulty of in situ data collection in vast and inaccessible areas, the use of optical sat...
A Special Issue of Atmosphere, “Atmospheric Composition and Cloud Cover Observations”, is focused on presenting some of the latest results of observations of clouds and atmospheric composition, mainly by referring to new equipment or expe...
The generation of cloud-free satellite mosaics is essential for a range of remote sensing applications, including land use mapping, ecosystem monitoring, and resource management. This study focuses on remote sensing across the climatic diversity of H...
Land Surface Temperature (LST) products obtained by thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing contain considerable blank areas due to the frequent occurrence of cloud coverage. The studies on the all-time reconstruction of the cloud-covered LST of geosta...
In monsoonal ecosystems, vegetation phenology is generally modulated by the timing and intensity of seasonal precipitation. Seasonal precipitation is often characterized by substantial interannual variability in both space and time. A rigorous quanti...
Accurate photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is crucial for stable grid integration, particularly under rapidly changing weather conditions. This study presents an ultra-short-term forecasting model that integrates sky imager data and meteorological...
Over the Sahara in summer, the activity of the Saharan thermal low pressure system (SHL), which is linked to the West-African monsoon dynamics and the mid-latitude circulation, is modulated by dust concentration and water-vapor transport. In this con...
Snow cover plays a crucial role in surface hydrology and energy balance, especially in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). This study used 12 years (2000–2011) of ground-observed snow depth at 87 meteorological stations to assess and verify the accura...
Snow cover is a sensitive indicator of global climate change, and optical images are an important means for monitoring its spatiotemporal changes. Due to the high reflectivity, rapid change, and intense spatial heterogeneity of mountainous snow cover...
Producing accurate land cover maps is time-consuming and estimating land cover changes between two generated maps is affected by error propagation. The increased availability of analysis-ready Earth Observation (EO) data and the access to big data an...
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