A Satellite-Based Sunshine Duration Climate Data Record for Europe and Africa

Besides 2 m - temperature and precipitation, sunshine duration is one of the most important and commonly used parameter in climatology, with measured time series of partly more than 100 years in length. EUMETSAT’s Satellite Application Facility on Climate Monitoring (CM SAF) presents a climate data...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRemote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 9; no. 5; p. 429
Main Authors Kothe, Steffen, Pfeifroth, Uwe, Cremer, Roswitha, Trentmann, Jörg, Hollmann, Rainer
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2017
Subjects
Bias
Climate
Climate monitoring
Climatic data
Climatology
Clouds
Correlation
Data processing
Estimates
Meteorological satellites
Meteosat
Precipitation
Remote sensing
Retrieval
satellite-based
Satellites
Solar radiation
Spatial discrimination
Spatial resolution
Sums
Sunlight
sunshine duration
Temperature effects
Time measurement
Time series
Europe
Africa
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Summary:Besides 2 m - temperature and precipitation, sunshine duration is one of the most important and commonly used parameter in climatology, with measured time series of partly more than 100 years in length. EUMETSAT’s Satellite Application Facility on Climate Monitoring (CM SAF) presents a climate data record for daily and monthly sunshine duration (SDU) for Europe and Africa. Basis for the advanced retrieval is a highly resolved satellite product of the direct solar radiation from measurements by Meteosat satellites 2 to 10. The data record covers the time period 1983 to 2015 with a spatial resolution of 0.05° × 0.05°. The comparison against ground-based data shows high agreement but also some regional differences. Sunshine duration is overestimated by the satellite-based data in many regions, compared to surface data. In West and Central Africa, low clouds seem to be the reason for a stronger overestimation of sunshine duration in this region (up to 20% for monthly sums). For most stations, the overestimation is low, with a bias below 7.5 h for monthly sums and below 0.4 h for daily sums. A high correlation of 0.91 for daily SDU and 0.96 for monthly SDU also proved the high agreement with station data. As SDU is based on a stable and homogeneous climate data record of more than 30 years length, it is highly suitable for climate applications, such as trend estimates.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs9050429