SatCORPS CERES GEO: Hourly Cloud and Radiation Properties from Meteosat-5

Hourly cloud micro-physical and radiation properties derived from the Meteosat-5 geostationary satellite's Visible Infra-Red Imager. The data is arranged in hourly files at 4 km resolution (sub-sampled to 8 km) in netCDF-4 format, supporting the NASA Langley Research Center's CERES project for Earth's radiant energy system studies. The CERES instrument series began launches in 1997, with the latest in 2017.

Use Cases

• Modeling the Earth's diurnal radiation cycle based on hourly global cloud property estimates.
• Analyzing cloud micro-physical properties based on satellite-derived retrievals.
• Estimating radiative fluxes between CERES instrument measurements based on merged geostationary satellite data.
• Studying atmospheric energy balance based on broadband radiometric measurements.

Strengths

• Provides hourly temporal resolution for analyzing diurnal cycles.
• Data is at 4 km spatial resolution at nadir.
• Part of the long-running CERES project, with instrument data spanning from 1997 to 2017.

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 Meteosat-5 geostationary satellite imager data using Langley Research Center (LaRC) SATCORPS algorithms.

Time Range

Hourly observations; specific date range not provided.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 22:09:04.004207; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Full disk coverage from the Meteosat-5 geostationary position.