Estimating Geo‐Referenced Cloud‐Base Height With Whole‐Sky Imagers

Abstract

Abstract Accurate and frequent cloud‐base height calculation is beneficial to solar farming and agricultural activities and also indicative for future meteorology conditions. This study used paired whole‐sky imagers to estimate cloud‐base height with high quality. The study obtained quality assured cloud base feature points with a robust Shi‐Tomasi‐Scale Invariant Feature Transform algorithm before employing double‐eye locating approach, which is fast and easy to implement operationally. The estimated cloud‐base heights have high spatial coverages. Evaluated against ceilometer observations, estimated cloud‐base heights have a high accuracy level, with R2 = 0.92 and RMSE = 424 m. The method is generally unbiased with NME = 9.2%. The high‐quality cloud‐base features in this study are quantitatively geo‐referenced, which would benefit a lot to meteorological studies such as fusion with satellite observations, evaluation for model simulations and upper‐level wind specifications.

Keywords

• cloud‐base height
• geo‐reference
• whole‐sky imager