Shallow cumulus cloud cover estimation by a stereo camera ring
Poster PDF
Authors
Rusen Oktem — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
David Romps — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Category
Warm low clouds, including aerosol interactions
Description
We take advantage of a stereo camera ring to measure shallow cumulus cloud cover at the ARM SGP site. A recently deployed ARM stereo camera ring surrounds the central facility of SGP at approximately 6 km radius with three calibrated camera pairs and provides time synchronized images of shallow clouds from multiple (three) views at twenty-second intervals. Each camera pair is calibrated to provide 3D coordinates of cloud points using our automatic cloud point matching and reconstruction software. We collect dense cloud point reconstructions from each pair and combine them to generate a 3D gridded cloud mask of the common field of view of the surrounded region. The fractional cloud cover is extracted from the 3D gridded cloud mask and the accuracy of the method is analyzed at various shallow cumulus conditions.
