SatCORPS CERES GEO Edition 4 GOES-15 Southern Hemisphere: Cloud and Radiation Properties

Southern Hemisphere cloud micro-physical and radiation properties derived hourly from GOES-15 geostationary satellite imager data. The dataset is arranged as hourly files in netCDF-4 format at 4 km resolution (sub-sampled to 8 km) and was produced by NASA's Langley Research Center using SatCORPS algorithms for the CERES project. CERES instruments, launched on missions from TRMM in 1997 to NOAA-20 in 2017, provide radiometric measurements of the Earth's atmosphere.

Use Cases

• Modeling the Earth's diurnal radiation cycle based on hourly cloud property estimates.
• Analyzing cloud micro-physical properties over the Southern Hemisphere based on satellite imager data.
• Estimating atmospheric fluxes between CERES instrument measurements based on merged hourly global cloud properties.
• Studying climate change impacts on cloud and radiation patterns in the Southern Hemisphere.

Strengths

• Data collection is complete, indicating a finalized product.
• Observations are at a spatial resolution of 4 km at nadir.
• Provides hourly temporal resolution for analyzing the diurnal cycle.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Derived from GOES-15 Imager data using Langley Research Center SatCORPS algorithms.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 22:10:06.079802; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Southern Hemisphere