SatCORPS CERES GEO: Hourly Cloud and Radiation Properties from Meteosat-7

CER_GEO_Ed4_MET07_FD_V02 is a NASA SatCORPS data product providing hourly cloud micro-physical and radiation properties derived from the Meteosat-7 geostationary satellite. The data is at 4 km resolution at nadir, sub-sampled to 8 km, and is arranged in hourly netCDF-4 files to support the CERES project's analysis of the Earth's diurnal energy cycle. CERES instruments, first launched in 1997, are a key component of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS).

Use Cases

• Modeling the diurnal cycle of Earth's radiation budget based on hourly cloud property data.
• Analyzing cloud micro-physical properties over the Meteosat-7 full disk coverage area.
• Estimating radiative fluxes between CERES instrument measurements using merged geostationary satellite data.
• Studying long-term climate trends using data from the CERES program, which follows the ERBE mission.

Strengths

• Data is derived from a well-established satellite program (CERES) with instruments launched between 1997 and 2017.
• Provides hourly temporal resolution for analyzing diurnal cycles.
• Offers a spatial resolution of 4 km at nadir.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset's specific temporal coverage range is not provided in the metadata.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Derived from Meteosat-7 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 22:09:08.295252; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Full disk coverage of the Meteosat-7 satellite.