AsianScientist (Jan. 9, 2017) – China launched its first minisatellite dedicated to carbon dioxide (CO2) detection and monitoring on December 22, 2016. The Chinese Carbon Dioxide Observation Satellite, also known as TANSAT, is designed to screen clouds for the presence of CO2. Details of the detection system have been published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
Previous cloud screening algorithms were designed to be used with sensors that contain multiple channels over a wide spectral range. However, the channels available to TANSAT cover only five spectral bands. To overcome this limitation, a group of researchers from Peking University developed a method to regroup individual results from a few threshold tests.
Their work relies upon the radiance data from the Visible and Infrared Radiometer (VIRR) on board China’s FengYun-3A polar-orbiting meteorological satellite (FY-3A), which uses four wavebands similar to that of TANSAT and can serve as a proxy for its measurements. The new cloud-screening scheme for TANSAT uses a method to regroup individual threshold tests on a pixel-by-pixel basis according to the derived clear confidence level.
The scheme has been applied to a number of the FY3A/VIRR scenes over four target areas (desert, snow, ocean, forest) in China for all seasons. Comparisons against a commercially available cloud-screening product suggest that the proposed scheme shows improved cloud-screening results.
The TANSAT project is one of several National High-tech Research and Development Programs funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The article can be found at: Wang et al. (2016) A Cloud Detection Scheme for the Chinese Carbon Dioxide Observation Satellite (TANSAT).
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Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences; Photo: TanSat Collaboration.
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