Aerosol retrievals from METEOSAT-8 - CM SAF

SAF on Climate Monitoring Visiting Scientists Report Doc. No: 1.0
Issue : 1.0
Date : 4 October 2006
The reasons for performing aerosol retrievals within the CM-SAF is that aerosol is a nuisance
parameter in many other CM-SAF-products, such as (thin) cloud products, surface radiation
parameters and surface / land albedo products. Moreover, aerosol properties are an important
climate product.
To develop a mature aerosol product within a federate SAF activity the following developments are
anticipated:
- Further development of the METEOSAT-8/SEVIRI aerosol product,
- Development of a scheme to separate absorbing from non-absorbing aerosols,
- Development of a single usable product for the research community by integrating different
research methods (METEOSAT, GOME and ATSR-2),
- Sophisticated co-location is needed to ensure that all products look at the same place and time,
- Validation of the output product with in situ and other measurements.
EUMETSAT would favour a federate SAF activity on aerosols. In preparation for the Continued
Development and Operational Phase (CDOP) the participating SAFs should include their
contribution to such a federate SAF activity in their CDOP proposals. Even though such activity
may have a reasonably low priority in each proposal, the fact that more proposals have the same
activity would raise the priority of this activity considerably.
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