Because they are constructed from weather satellite measurements lacking long-term stability, ISCCP and PATMOS-x suffer from artifacts that can introduce “spurious” variability in the records over time, which can inhibit their use in cloud change studies.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, lead author Joel Norris and colleagues discuss the need for and the methods used to make these corrections. The two new datasets are freely available and archived at the Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. http://dx.doi.org/10.5065/D62J68XR.
This project was the result of a grant from the Climate Monitoring program within COD to SIO.
To view the paper, visit: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JTECH-D-14-00058.1