Improved Estimates of Hourly Insolation from GMS S-VISSR Data

Special images from the Geostationary Meteorological Satellite (GMS) were used by the Meteorological Satellite Center (MSC) to watch a typhoon for the period from 1 August 1997 through 19 August 1997. We use three successive images with 15-minute time differences of the northern hemisphere from 03:31 UTC to 04:15 UTC throughout the period. A simple physical model is applied to the visible image of GMS-5 to estimate the insolation at the ground in 0.01° grids. The estimates of hourly insolation have been improved at 63 of the 67 validation points using three well-navigated successive images. It has been found that the increase of observation frequency results in better estimates of the hourly insolation. Therefore, as the combination of geostationary meteorological satellites, for example, GMS-5 and FY-2 (Chinese Geostationary Meteorological Satellite), running in two shifts provides twice as frequent observation than each of them. The improvement for hourly insolation estimate can be operational.