A bispectral method for the automatic determination of parameters for use in imaging satellite cloud retrievals

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Abstract
Two major problems in deriving cloud amounts and physical properties from satellite imagery are the selection of suitable surface-type discriminators, which may vary as a function of time and place, and the extraction of cloudiness on the subpixel scale. We present a method of retrieving suitable parameters for such discriminations on the local scale, based on the information contained in a bispectral (visible and 11 μm infrared) histogram. The application of these parameters to the retrieval of cloud information on both the pixel and subpixel scales is demonstrated.