Increasing the spatial resolution of cloud property retrievals from Meteosat SEVIRI by use of its high-resolution visible channel: implementation and examples

The modification of an existing cloud property retrieval scheme for the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on board the geostationary Meteosat satellites is described to utilize its highresolution visible (HRV) channel for increasing the spatial resolution of its physical outputs. This results in products with a nadir spatial resolution of 1 x 1 km(2) compared to the standard 3 x 3 km(2) resolution offered by the narrowband channels. This improvement thus greatly reduces the resolution gap between current geostationary and polar-orbiting meteorological satellite imagers. In the first processing step, cloudiness is determined from the HRV observations by a threshold-based cloud masking algorithm. Subsequently, a linear model that links the 0.6 mu m, 0.8 mu m, and HRV reflectances provides a physical constraint to incorporate the spatial high-frequency component of the HRV observations into the retrieval of cloud optical depth. The implementation of the method is described, including the ancillary datasets used. It is demonstrated that the omission of high-frequency variations in the cloud-absorbing 1.6 mu m channel results in comparatively large uncertainties in the retrieved cloud effective radius, likely due to the mismatch in channel resolutions. A newly developed downscaling scheme for the 1.6 mu m reflectance is therefore applied to mitigate the effects of this scale mismatch. Benefits of the increased spatial resolution of the resulting SEVIRI products are demonstrated for three example applications: (i) for a convective cloud field, it is shown that significantly better agreement between the distributions of cloud optical depth retrieved from SEVIRI and from collocated MODIS observations is achieved. (ii) The temporal evolution of cloud properties for a growing convective storm at standard and HRV spatial resolutions are compared, illustrating an improved contrast in growth signatures resulting from the use of the HRV channel. (iii) An example of surface solar irradiance, determined from the retrieved cloud properties, is shown, for which the HRV channel helps to better capture the large spatiotemporal variability induced by convective clouds. These results suggest that incorporating the HRV channel into the retrieval has potential for improving Meteosat-based cloud products for several application domains.