INVESTIGATION OF CLOUD COVERAGE OVER ASIA WITH NOAA AVHRR TIME SERIES

In order to compute cloud coverage statistics over Asian region, an operational scheme for masking cloud-contaminated pixels in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) daytime data was developed, evaluated and presented. Dynamic thresholding was used with channell, 2 and 3 to automatically create a cloud mask for a single image. Then the IO-day cloud coverage imagery was generated over the whole Asian region along with cloud-free composite imagery. Finally the monthly based statistics were computed based on the derived cloud coverage imagery in terms of land cover and country. As a result, it was found that 20-day is required to acquire the cloud free data over the whole Asia using NOAA AVHRR. The to-day cloud coverage and cloud-free composite imagery derived in this research is available via the web-site http://webpanda.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/CloudCover/.