Automatic Classification of Clouds on METEOSAT Imagery: Application to High-Level Clouds

Abstract

A statistical classification method based on clustering on three-dimensional histograms is applied to the three channels of the METEOSAT imagery [Visible (VIS)–Infrared Window (IR)–Infrared Water Vapor (WV)]. The results of this classification are studied for different cloud cover cases over tropical regions. For high-level cloud classes, it is shown that the bidimensional histogram IR-WV allows one to deduce the cloud top temperature even for semi-transparent clouds.