SatCORPS CERES GEO Edition 4: Hourly Cloud and Radiation Data from Meteosat-8

Hourly cloud micro-physical and radiation properties derived from the SEVIRI instrument on the Meteosat-8 geostationary satellite at 4 km nadir resolution. The data set is arranged as hourly files in netCDF-4 format and supports the CERES project, a key component of NASA's Earth Observing System. CERES instruments, first launched in 1997, follow the legacy of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment mission.

Use Cases

• Modeling the Earth's diurnal radiation cycle based on hourly cloud property estimates.
• Analyzing cloud micro-physical properties over the Northern Hemisphere based on SEVIRI instrument data.
• Estimating radiative fluxes between CERES instrument measurements based on merged geostationary satellite data.

Strengths

• Data is derived at a high spatial resolution of 4 km at nadir.
• Collection is complete, providing a finalized hourly time series.
• Supports a long-running NASA mission with instruments launched 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 using Langley Research Center (LaRC) SATCORPS algorithms from Meteosat-8 SEVIRI imager data.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 21:40:32.958808; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Northern Hemisphere