The Operational Calibration of Images Taken in the Visible Channel of the Meteosat Series of Satellites

A method and its implementation are presented for the automatic calibration of the images taken in the visible channel of the Meteosat series of satellites. The method performs on a daily basis and is based on a statistical analysis of two images: one when the sun illuminates the entire field of view of Meteosat, the other during nighttime. This approach does not require any information about atmospheric and surface parameters, and therefore can be easily performed either on archived data, or in quasi-real time when receiving the images. Daily calibration coefficients were obtained since 1985 and are available on the Internet. The results are fully consistent with previous studies.